Brand & Design More Important than Ever

Good, unique Website content just isn’t enough anymore. If you want traffic, you have to get people to show you some love.

Of course a branding agency and design firm will be the first to tell you that brand and web design are more important than ever — that is of course if you want people and search engines to find and engage your website. That’s right. Search engines like Google care about the design of your Website and how it appeals to human aesthetics and usability.

Google’s new update (dubbed “Panda”) to its algorithm for ranking websites is a game changer, turning traditional search engine optimization on it’s head. Google’s stated goal has always been for it’s search engine to think more human. However, up until now, the major search engine optimization criteria have always seemed anything but human. Meta tags, keywords, link-building… are still important boxes to check on your SEO list, but they’re not as heavily weighted as they once were. The social media revolution has given individual people the ability to truly let search engines know (directly and indirectly) the value of a website’s content. And search engines are watching and learning.

Now [design and user experience] has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn’t all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren’t that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that’s surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don’t look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform.

— Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz