Search Engine Friendly Design is one concept I often repeat, and its fascinating to me as it never grows “old-school” while only gets improving with more and more complex elements comes in. Here are 35 awesome design examples of SEO friendly design. They are each different in appearance but illustrate how SEO can be incorporated to seemingly complex design. Some of them are visually simple but in the backend are very powerful SEO wise, do check the source code to check yourself whether the SEO metrics are in place or not.

They are in no particular order.

1. Daily Blog Tips

- Daniel’s website has a design that highlights the content and the design elements does not in anyway obstruct the engines from crawling, rather helps them by organizing each elements by their calculated weightage. Great work.

2. About.com

About.com is a very familiar site. It pops up on the SERPs for a wide variety or keywords and ho-to articles. The secret is in their navigational structure. They have enormous volume of content which are indexed well through effective navigation structure and easy design. The design focuses on easy crawling and robust navigation.

3. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine has a very search engine friendly design where a lot of importance is given to the content and everything else neatly tucked to the bottom (in the source code). The titles, comment area, images used and subheadings are complimentary to the primary content. Clever design this one.

4. Morning News

The morning news has a text based layout which is one of the best in the minimalistic space. Awesome blend of usability and SEO.

5. Aiga NY

The Aiga NY website is yet another marvellous example of how SEO can co-exist with really eye-catchy design. It would be a pleasure reading through the articles here as they are designed for readability with the minimum effort. If you go through the source code, you’ll understand how they’ve used the titles for maximum visibility and the navigation structure for effortless crawling.

6. Ars Technica

Ars Technica doesn’t really have to worry much about the crawling frequencies and google love as they publish lot of stories and are very much linked from the social media channels. The only problem they might face is the similarity and thinness in content. But they have an excellent structure that highlights and makes the content rich. I particularly like the way the do the description part beneath every title. A clever move.

7. Freelance Switch

Freelance switch is a nice example on how to use heavy design with SEO elements in place. Most of the sites from the envato network uses the common elements such as gradients, backgrounds and sharp borders. But even while using lots of images, we can see how well they are manipulated for SEO benefit. They’ve done a good job, but there are lot of opportunities and stones left unturned here. Personally, I’m a big fan of the envato design. So can’t leave out these guys.

8. The Net Setter

Collis Ta’eed is the man when it comes to text based design. He just churns out wonderful designs, which are elegant and classy. Net Setter has the best text based (you won’t even realized that there are many images used in there) navigation and content that is a visual treat as well as SEO’d.

9.  Tech Crunch

Since the last redesign TC has recovered from numerous mistakes. They have a very simple layout now that’s more blog like with a good focus on content. TC design also manages to incorporate all its (overload of) contents wisely without compromising on the user experience. But for a site like TC, to move to a simpler design takes some guts, but this one has sure worked for them.

10. Google Help/FAQ’s

The Google FAQ and Help pages are the best examples of SEO friendly design and navigation. The navigational structure and the minimalistic text based design is exceptional with all the SEO elements in place.