What comes first, blog SEO or Blog design? An argument that has done the rounds for a long time so I am not going to enter into it – at least not in this post.
Where blogs SEO and blog design do clash is where the design defeats the SEO processes. A good example is where poor code prevents the search engine spiders from reading your complete site.
When a spider comes to visit it reads your site page by page following all the links that they are allowed to follow. As it comes across content, it reads and indexes that content so that it can be found by a searcher. The page also starts to develop a ranking that will determine its place in the search engine results pages. Your blog design needs to facilitate the work done by the spiders. Your blog SEO provides the links and keywords that you want the spider to concentrate.
If your blog design has any code problems then it is possible that your content will not get read and consequently not get indexed. Not only that, the spider will probably not continue on to any of the other pages so they will not get indexed either.
There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to check to see if your site is W3C compliant. This checks the code of the page to see if there are any problems with the blog design. The second option is to use a spider simulator. This is a software program that displays a copy of your web page as the spider sees it. You can see whether or not the spider can read the whole page or if it, and where, it breaks down.
Part of your blog SEO strategy should be to run regular checks on your pages for both compliance and spider readability. If your blog design is good, your site will pass both checks.
