If you have overhauled your website any time recently, you will be aware of how important design is to your success. A good design has to be pleasing to the eye, yet have enough room for your search engine optimisation and at the same time be easy to use.

It’s easy to get caught up in the big picture when it comes to design. Most businesses concentrate their design energies on picking overall themes, trying to work their corporate concepts into their site and special effects. Little things get lost in the maelstrom.

Font selection is an oft-overlooked component of web design which can have a huge impact on how viewers react to your site. The importance of font is something that the advertising industry has been aware of for over a century. Every advertising campaign spends hours poring over font charts because the look of the text will convey many things about the product and the company. Selection of font for your site is no different.

Your font can also cause or resolve some of your SEO problems. Overly ‘pretty’ fonts can present a problem when it comes to SEO. To ensure an unusual font will be visible on all computers, often the best way to go is to embed the text in a graphic. This requires the content to be provided within the code as well, to ensure the search engine spiders will be able to view it. Cloaking text in this way, however, can result in penalties from search engines. Listing alternative fonts in your CSS code is a good alternative strategy. It does, however, mean that you have less control of your design for machines that can’t load the special font.

It’s also important to remember that search engine web bots take font into account. Google not only analyses page content for text, but also reportedly factors in font size and word location. Bold, coloured or otherwise highlighted text is also noted by web bots as content of particular importance. At the same time, you don’t want to annoy your viewers and it is thought that overuse of highlighting can lead to penalties.

When choosing a font for your site, keep it simple. Having more than a couple of font styles will annoy your site’s viewers and make the site look messy. Most guidelines on usability recommend that you provide options for your viewers to determine font size, and this kind of flexibility will affect the design of each page. The choice of serif or sans serif fonts, namely the choice between fonts with tails like Times New Roman versus fonts without like Arial, will affect how the viewer perceives your site and also how readable it is. For more information on the right font for your site, talk to our experts at SEO Consult.

Font selection is one of the aspects of your website which will have little direct impact on your search engine optimisation. Like any aspect of design, however, it will have a roundabout effect. Pleasing your viewers leads to return traffic and makes it easier to achieve backlinks. Adding that little extra touch to make it easier for search engines to trawl your site also helps. As in many areas of SEO, a small amount of consideration can bring good results.

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