We’re down to the wire with the steps for a good website design, and now it boils down to those nitpicky details an online business owner should have a search engine marketing expert around to catch.

This optimization detail of website design and layout involves something you would never think about until it is missing: Alignment.

The human eye is naturally drawn to symmetry, balance and proportion. In nature, it denotes something “healthy” and we are drawn to that instinctually. As a website owner you should capitalize on this inclination by making sure the alignment of your page is balanced and flawless.

This certainly does not mean that everything should be in a straight line going down your page like it’s on a sheet of 8.5×11 paper, but even if you choose a non-standard design, make sure things that are supposed to be aligned are actually coded to do so.

There is just nothing worse to look at than web design with text that either bounces all over the page, shows strange characters or spacing, or doesn’t line up with the text above and below it. From a design standpoint, it just looks ugly and unprofessionally done, even if you have excellent information.

We recommend aligning your text and imagery to a grid structure to minimize any potential runtime errors with coding, or any kind of mishap that could occur. A grid can potentially assist your web design, too, by showing you the balance down to the pixels, so, keep it in mind as you get to the home stretch in our following posts.

The sixth step of the search engine marketing expert’s website redesign is to implement several of the previous steps and then check how you compare to industry standards. Usability, like navigability is the end result of your website layout plans and drafts, and it’s essentially the entire purpose of your putting a website business up. If it does not work, then you can’t either.

The focus of usability for a search engine marketer optimizing a web design to go public, centers around a few points: User behavior, Industry standards, and User’s purpose.

Although you and your SEM team are intimately familiar with your website business, your users don’t spend their entire day on your site, so when they come in, their click paths and behavior on the landing page they enter in on will be completely different than your behavior. Optimizing your web design to guide user behavior the way you want is important, and there are tools to test and see how successful you are.

Industry standards are the other factor your online business needs to successfully accomplish. Users expect a certain standard number of things to work correctly on your site, and so you need to provide that, in the design, layout and functionality.

Finally, the ultimate thing your online business needs to do is provide your potential users the path to their intended goal. If your users enter the page with a task in mind, your layout and web design better help them achieve that easily. A website is a tool for people to use, and you want your online business to be an easy and pleasurable tool, so you gain more users and a loyal customer base.

We are well past the half-way point of nine steps a SEM should take for a good website design, and the fifth point is one of the most important elements of a website design for search engine marketing experts to consider: TEXT style.

Since text drives most of the information on your website business, you owe it to your company to incorporate a good font. Now, it can’t just be “pretty” it also has to be easy to read and something that most web browsers are capable of supporting, otherwise you run the risk of your online business page looking like gibberish to some of your potential customers. You also want to choose a font that fits the image of your company. If you want the website to look more modern or more retro there are fonts available for both. (We recommend, for example, avoiding Times New Roman entirely, because it’s the font chosen for high school and college English papers.)

Font size, is another element of typography to consider, along with its spacing and padding (as we’ve discussed in a previous point). The two other web design elements to consider with these are the color of the font, and its contrast to the background. As search engine marketing experts engineering the look of a site for general optimization, you want clear and easy to read font, which may mean a higher contrast and larger default text size.

Finally, the website design element you can control easily is the size of your paragraphs. Bear in mind, this is a website, not a high school English paper, so break up your paragraphs by following the “unofficial SEM rule of thumb,” by keeping your paragraphs 2-3 sentences at most.

The fourth step for search engine marketing teams building or redesigning an online business’ website is to take a step offline and look at what web layout elements are design-to-build.

Just like a cookie cutter will produce a tray of perfect star-shaped cookies, your website business’ design needs to rest on some actual building facts and fundamentals. The four points to consider in your web design start with the first actual fact: Can you actually build it?

While designing a fancy architecture for your website is good in theory, search engine marketing experts need to be more like engineers than architects and ensure the website business’ design elements can actually be achieved by the current tools, and the amount the owner is willing to spend on a design/redesign.

The second point is how big or small your website is. Have you ever gone to a website that was not built for a large browser and has those tacky “edges” or a left-aligned background? Take into consideration the browsers that will load your site, as well as the internet speeds of your potential customers.

The third and fourth point are mostly on the side of “is this going to be very difficult to implement” and “is there a simpler way to do this?” They differ for SEMs in the fact that the third point asks if it’s worth implementing difficult code into the background of a website business based on how useful/necessary the result will be. The fourth point asks whether it’s possible to make the page’s code simpler so there’s less chance of it breaking. The more design elements that are added, the more complex a page’s code can become, especially in CSS. If there is one piece of code that could address multiple design elements then consider doing that, instead of having three pieces of code for three different design elements.

Continuing our posts on website design elements for search engine marketing is today’s post; the third step of acquiring or creating a good website.

One of the most agonizing experiences for a website’s potential customer, or frequent user, is to come into a website that ranks high in search engine marketing and optimization, but is impossible to navigate. At the end of the day, you are not building your website to please any egos in the online business—you HAVE to satisfy your customers, and they need to be able to find things on your website that match the search terms they entered to look for your products or services.

Navigation is partially a series of visual cues you need to implement into the website design elements. A museum sets up visual cues for its visitors by showing the beginning and ending of an exhibit with walls, signs and even the time periods of the pieces they’re showing, to guide their visitors. Your website design needs to do the same.

The navigation “bar,” which holds the buttons to click around the page, should go in a commonsense and visible place, like the top or the sides of the page where the eye can immediately see them. After that, your viewers should see where they are in the page with things like changing colors for links, and named subheads that relate to the main page the users navigated from. From a web design and optimization perspective, it’s the equivalent of the arrows and signs in the museums.