SEO and responsive web design (RWD) techniques are closely linked, and RWD is almost always the superior choice when trying to optimize rankings. Of course, optimization is not the only approach to marketing, but it is an important one, and RWD helps a site out in many other ways as well. But what is RWD and how exactly can it help snare additional traffic? In short, it’s the future of the Internet and enables a company to present itself well on multiple platforms simultaneously.
How are SEO and responsive web design linked together?
Search engine optimization relies on many components, most of them concerning the relevancy of the site’s content and the strength of its architecture. Think of it this way – a site that offers the best content on the Internet will suffer in the rankings if it offers poor navigation or does not add new content regularly. It’s not just about how nice the site looks, though that is important too. It’s also about how the site presents its information and how easy it is for search engines to file through.
RWD is one of the newest design paradigms to take hold, and it operates using simple principles. In the past, companies had to produce multiple versions of their site for people with different monitor sizes. This problem was greatly exacerbated with the rise of mobile devices, as condensing information made for a monitor more than a foot long becomes a major issue when shrunk down to a phone. Initially, companies would just pay to have additional versions of their site designed, sinking money into a process that would weaken their search engine rankings.
The reason why RWD is a far superior choice is because it offers ultimate flexibility. RWD created sites are made with modular pieces of content that adapt to the size of the screen they are presented on. In this way, the content flows like water and fills any space without the need for panning horizontally or fishing around for content. This means only one version of a site has to be created with RWD, which prevents duplicate content, a notorious drag on SEO. Also, Google only has to crawl a single instance of the site with RWD, ensuring the site is indexed properly. Google heavily dings a site that cannot be indexed well, so this is essential.
SEO and responsive web design will be tied together for the foreseeable future as well, because Google prefers it, and anything Google prefers is what business owners should prefer. Google considers sites with RWD to be better at delivering content (which they are) because they allow users to quickly sort through content no matter what device they are using. Google relies entirely on ranking sites that users want to see up high, so it will always give preference to companies that build their online presence around RWD.
Of course, executing RWD requires some expertise, but with an experienced firm helping out, that shouldn’t be a problem.