Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a subject that is of most prominence for most business owners who want to be on top of the Google’s search result page. But you should keep in mind that web design also plays an important role in SEO and it definitely helps in boosting your rankings.
First of all, it has been marked on the Central Webmaster blog of Google as the best procedures to follow while designing a website to get the good results from Google. For instance, when you use breadcrumb trail on your site, Google bots will be able to drag all the pages to your website and use the site just like visitor might have used it. Other aspects including recognized URLs and robots.txt are also covered by the blog.
Additionally, there is some proof to prove that Google makes use of information from Google Analytics while opting where to rank a website. The information includes how long a user remains on a site, how many pages have been viewed by them, and overall how many visits does the page gets. All these things prove that a user friendly and a well designed site will get visitors who use the site often and stay there for long time, and this could fairly affect the search engine rankings of the site.
The very important aspect where web design and SEO is related is that it is very easy to apply a strategy of SEO in a new website than the one that already exists. With an already existing website, it will have good ranking in the search engines already, Google may penalize you by either taking out your listing temporarily from the search engines or it may push your rankings down significantly, if you try to change the system by making alterations such as which page ranks for specific keyword or try to change meta-data in a dramatic way. You may have a hard time in getting your site back to its real rankings once this situation arises. It is very important that you perform a keyword research while designing a new website. This helps you to select different keywords for your website that can bring appropriate traffic and then you can decide on the pages that you want to keep in your website.