SEO experts understand the importance not only of relevant and important content on a website, but also the design of the website itself. Websites are ranked by their importance and relevance to the topic they claim to be providing information about, but search engines also rank pages based on usefulness. How useful is your website to your visitors? How easy is it to find information on your website? The plus side to creating a useful website is that it not only helps increase your search engine ranking, but it also helps your visitors. We will discuss later issues about SEO web design meanwhile here are 10 tips for designing a useful website.

1. Professionalism. Your website should look like it was designed by a professional, even if it wasn’t. There’s nothing that will compromise a potential customer’s faith in your abilities than a website that looks like it was designed by an amateur. The style of your site should be attractive to your target audience.

2. No Room for Squares. If you really must use square corners on your site, limit the instances in which you use them. Nothing says “amateur” like a site built on boxes.

3. Forget Adsense. Adsense ads are the equivalent of yelling, “This site is low-budget!” Adsense ads running across the bottom of your site aren’t quite as bad, but the more prominent the PPC ads are on your site, the more low-quality your site appears. This doesn’t mean you have to forget using ads all together, but Adsense ads just look cheap.

4. Clean it Up. Clutter on a website makes it harder for your visitors to find what they’re looking for, and they’re likely to leave if they can’t find their way around your site quickly and easily.

5. Test Browsers. Before you launch your website, see what it looks like in different browsers with different resolutions. No one will stay on your website for very long if all they see is a jumble of text and images.

6. Find a Good Host. You’ll lose visitors quickly if your website is down because you haven’t chosen a good host.

7. Check Your Code. If visitors come to your site only to find a PHP error, they’ll not only leave, but they probably also won’t come back again in the future. In addition, it simply looks unprofessional to have a website that’s broken.

8. Avoid the Flash. Flash gets in the way of what your visitors are looking for. It can be distracting and annoying, and calls attention to the flash instead of your products and services.

9. Shut Down the Audio. If someone working in a public area finds your site, chances are he will leave as quickly as he arrived if there’s music automatically playing on your website. It’s annoying, it’s distracting, and it will send people right back to the search engine before they’ve even seen what you have to offer.

10. No Cover Pages. Even if you include a “skip intro” link, it’s still easier for visitors to click back to the search engine than it is to click on “skip intro.” Cover pages are nothing more than a barrier to your content, and you want your content as accessible as possible.

These tips don’t guarantee that a visitor will stick around at your site, but following them will at least ensure that your design doesn’t scare them away. Remember, the point is to make information about your products and services as accessible as possible. Anything that acts as a barrier to that information should be removed or corrected at once. If you still aren’t sure whether your site is well-designed or not, consult with an SEO or internet marketing expert. They will help you correct any problems and help you turn visitors into customers.

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