Search engine optimization (SEO) and website design go hand in hand. You want visitors (the human variety) and search engines to find their way around – quickly and with no roadblocks.

People really don’t care whether the navigation is in a graphic format or text – it’s just a matter of logic and clarity. Is it easy to get where they’d like to go?

Search engines don’t care either way. Either they can wander freely through your website or your structure stops them. Search engines just give up and really don’t mind whether you rank for one keyword or 1,000.

Here are some quick tips to make sure you get indexed as much as possible without compromising your website design:

1. Put keywords in text navigation; search engines give credit to text, not so much to images (a little bit).
2. Don’t overwhelm pages with source code. Longer pages can throw off search engines. Large page file sizes aren’t a good thing either.
3. Include keywords in your URLs – better to say .com/product-keyword.html than jamming together or abbreviating words in a URL. Don’t go overboard and toss in 5 keywords in a row.
4. Use H tags (like H1) for page headings (those are like headlines).
5. Include keywords in your title tags (right at the top of your page source code)