An example of a mobile friendly web design for NJ client. Completely search engine optimized.

Here at Manna, our NJ web design team is constantly being asked to come up with creative, exciting new design styles.  We also are asked to help make sure the website we’re building is going to come up top in the search results.  Below is a great article from Website Magazine on the impact certain, popular design trends can have on Search Engine Optimization and overall search engine ranking.

Mobile Friendly Web Design and Search Engine Optimization

In particular, we pay very close attention to how Mobile Friendly (responsive web design) a website is when hoping for good search results.  We’ve seen time and again that Google will lower a website’s rank if the site does not work well on mobile devices.  The reason for this is simple…  almost half of all internet users in the US are on a mobile device.  If possible, Google (and the search engine of Bing too) will avoid recommending a website if it isn’t mobile friendly.  If they send a person to a non-mobile friendly site, they know right away, the visitor experience will be less than positive.  Google is all about the visitor experience; if it’s a bad one, they own part of it.

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 Web Design Trends That Impact SEO

Original Article by: By Ant Hodges, The Web Video Studio

If you think of SEO as a separate entity in your online presence you could be making costly mistakes with your website and other marketing techniques. Every aspect of a strong online brand is deeply intertwined with related elements – content obviously plays a major role, but so does the design and development of any given website.
As design trends come and go it’s the responsibility of designers and marketers alike to question the impact these style choices have on the page rank of their clients. After all, design trends are temporary, but a strong online presence is something you need to build for the long run.

Mobile Optimization

First of all, Google has started to flag up certain websites that aren’t properly optimized for mobile devices. If you run a separate mobile device and your listings in Google redirect to the mobile homepage by default, the search engine will warn users that your site doesn’t work properly on your devices. This is so users who click on a blog post or product page in search results don’t end up on a mobile homepage wondering why the hell they haven’t gone to the page they clicked on. Fair enough.

Luckily you don’t have to worry about the split SEO issue with separate mobile sites anymore because Google has made it simple enough to tie mobile sites with a parent URL. But you are more susceptible to duplicate content when you run separate sites, so take care when it comes to mobile-only sites.

The alternative of course is responsive design and the ‘mobile first’ philosophy that soon followed. Mobile first is certainly has its merits from a UX point of view – especially with the oncoming flurry of wearable technology and other devices. We’re not just designing for desktop and mobile any more people; those days are already behind us. While the key SEO benefit to having a single site for all devices is hugely reduced risk of duplicate content.

>>>   Read the Complete Article Here!   >>>

The full article discusses UX Design,  Parallax Design, Fixed Navigation and Off-Screen Navigation.  A great article, well worth the few minutes to read it.