Demand of Smart mobiles & tablets is increasing among the buyers across the world, keeping this growing trend in mind website owners are now more interested in responsive websites , but how a website is going to perform is not limited to design only, your site must be visible to the potential buyer & then only you can expect to earn money from your website.
Responsive design has it's own look & style, which sometimes may create an issue from an SEO stand point of view. Therefore as an SEO professional it's your duty to let the designer know about your issues, especially prior to or during the wireframe process. You see responsive design is mostly about using white spaces & eliminating unnecessary elements so that a visitor only focuses on the main content of the page, for this reason some elements which are considered to be important from SEO standpoint of view(i.e internal linking etc.) may get pushed down under the banner. This will force the visitor to scroll down the page to see the links. One can solve this issue by reducing the banner size, reducing the white space& adjusting the font size.
Like I said before, responsive design is more about visibility & content strategy often gets neglected in this regard. Many times I have met web sites that have no content above the fold and then suddenly a big bunch of text just before the footer at the bottom of the page, with a designer's view it may look normal to a person, but it may be taken differently by a search engine boat. Therefore if you have redesigned your site that primarily had text blocks above the fold then you might want to work on this for better visibility in mobile search engine.
There is another thing to consider when going responsive & that is the key word density in the text blocks, which is often lost in most of the cases. To cope with this, spot testing could be a useful option…along with that makes sure that there is a balance between the short tail & long tail phrases, you should also be careful about any particular keyword unusually weighted to any particular phrase.
To produce a minimalist responsive design, often internal links get removed which doesn't score a point from SEO point of view. Sometimes internal linking is allowed up to category level only, but beyond that (i.e product level) internal linking rate drops aggressively. Again, spot checking should be done to make sure that a proper internal page linking is maintained.
Site loading time is a crucial factor both from the point of user experience & SEO, failing to which could have noticeable impact on the visibility of your site in search engine. Unfortunately responsive sites use more codes than usual & codes make the site ‘heavy' ! One can work it other way by resizing the images, consolidating CSS files into a single one..etc.
Sometimes it can be difficult to work on a responsive design project keeping the value of brand, appeal & SEO requirements all in mind at a time, but by working closely with the designers, marketers & other responsible persons we can still get a great responsive site that neither compromises with SEO requirements nor the aesthetic appeal of the site.
Subhadip is a freelance internet marketer , working for Infosolz Consultany Services pvt ltd. An website design company based in Kolkata, India.
