If looks could kill… your search rankings

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been slowly catching-up with my RSS feeds and of the many things I’ve read, there was this post: The Site Was About…uh, It Was Orange? (submitted to SEOmoz by Sarita from Rise Interactive).

The basic premise of the post was that it would be good if search engines could categorised websites by layout / design / colours etc.

As I skimmed through the article, I pretty-much dismissed this concept because really, the layout and design of a site is just the ‘packaging’ and the true value and importance comes from the content and functionality.

People don’t use Google because they think that it looks pretty (in actual fact, the minimal use of colours and simplistic layout almost make it seem a little bland), but people keep coming back because it’s a highly functional search tool. Wikipedia is another fine example of a site that looks fairly ordinary, but is used by hundreds of thousands of people every day because of the vast quantities of user submitted content.

Although there are plenty of reasons to have a website, I believe the most common are:

• for branding or used as a sales / marketing tool
• as an educational or informative resource (which also helps promote your authority for a given topic or industry)
• and to share your views, opinions, to vent, rant and generally express yourself

So going back to the start of this post, if you found a website, but the only thing you remembered about it was how it looked, then the owner of that website has pretty-much failed to deliver on most of those points above. Branding has failed since you have no recollection of who owned the site, they obviously didn’t deliver any ground-breaking content that would entice you to keep coming back for more… and if you spent most of your time drooling over the design, you probably would have been too distracted to make a purchase from them.

But then it got me thinking… how often have you seen an advertisement on TV which you really enjoyed, but not had a clue about what product it was actually promoting. Some of the best ads work because they are so obscure that they keep you guessing, inspiring conversation and causing you to subconsciously waste more time than you realise trying to find some vague relationship as to why a gorilla doing a Phil Collins drum solo could be so darn effective at selling chocolate.

So, now I started thinking – if this technique is so effective for traditional advertising, then it is highly likely that a website could create a very unique and interesting user experience (take for example the Don’t Click It site) which keeps you guessing and intrigued that you don’t even notice the content or branding.

Research shows that memories are most commonly triggered by the various senses. You smell something that haven’t smelt in years and all of a sudden you’re taken back to the alluring smell of your Mum’s cooking. You hear a song that you loved as a teenager, but haven’t heard it in over 10 years – even before they start singing the first verse you’re mind has wandered back to what you were doing the first time you ever heard that song.

Then there are paintings, sculptures, photos, movies, natural land formations, sunsets, and many other forms of eye candy that leaves a lasting impression on you. Why can’t a website do the same?

Just like I know that I really like the painting with those melting clocks (I may not realise that it’s called The Persistence of Memory by the artist Salvador Dali)… I just know it had clocks, looked a bit surreal and that I liked it. Given this vague description of the piece, it’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to search for something like “painting with melting clocks” and find more details about (and possibly pictures of) the painting in question.

So if I can search for a piece of artwork like that, then technically, I should also be able to find quirky and interesting looking website using a similar method. Unfortunately, people don’t generally refer to (nor link to) sites based on what they look like… instead they reference the site either by the domain name, company/individuals name or by the content found on the site.

The good news is that as social media continues to take-over the net, people are forever getting more descriptive with their tagging, bookmarking and referencing of sites and the search engines are already pretty good at indexing image content. All of this will make searches for specific styles and layouts a lot easier to find in the future.

There will never be a substitute to having great content and ensuring your site has the best usability and functionality possible, however if your goal is simply to be ‘eye catching’ then there still may be hope in having your site ranked organically (and if that fails, there’s always PPC).

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