Does Website Design (Quality Theme vs Free Theme) Matter in SEO

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LindseyInteractive

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Hello,

As you may have seen in some of my other threads I have been talking about what the average CTR of websites are for adsense, etc.

Now, I have a question here, my website portfolio (Adsense one) is ONLY created mostly for making money via Adsense, we are going to revamp them to try to work on CTR and things of that nature, and I want to know.

Do you think the type of template/theme you use for your website will matter as far as rankings go? For example would a site rank higher if it used a premium paid theme vs a free adsense optimized theme simply because it offers users a "better look and feel".
 
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Website design/look doesn't matter when it comes to rankings but the poor coding and slow loading pages do.
 
For me yes because it can influence bounce rate and the time that visitor spend on the site and this has an impact on SEO
 
There is absolutely no excuse for bad design but you don't need a premium theme.

Try and find a free theme that fits well into your niche.
 
Page loading times and eliminating 404's are very important, remember speed speed speed.
 
It doesn't really matter as long as your site is smooth and looks good to the eye :)
 
I've read a couple times that responsive design gets preferential treatment. I can't speak from experience.

Load times definitely make a difference. Stay away from heavy flash designs. It helps for your site to be user oriented and easy to navigate with a couple different links to each page throughout your site.
 
Thank you guys so much for all the responses and thoughts on the matter. It really helps my decisions, I have a couple themes in mind, going to split test them on a couple sites that get almost the exact same amount of traffic.
 
It doesn't affect directly your SEO, but will affect in the user time spent and returning rate on your website, which is good for SEO. Notice that a good website design sometimes affect on the page load, so it's important to measure what is your priority.
 
Google uses the Chrome browser to watch for usability. Since the browser sends a lot of info back to them, they get to see your activity on the pages and pages with bad usability normally get demoted on the search results.
 
syme00 said:
For me yes because it can influence bounce rate and the time that visitor spend on the site and this has an impact on SEO
Click to expand...

Yes exactly what I was going to state. It seems to indirectly affect SEO. If you choose a theme that is poorly optimized or looks like every other 1 page squeeze ad people will react accordingly. However, if you take the time to design a professional looking website and make sure its easy to navigate and has the content is searching for the bounce rate will be lower which is a ranking factor for google, albeit a small one.
 
A website design can make your readers stay or go away. If you want to make your readers stay, use a theme that doesn't hurt the eyes.
 
kuskka said:
It doesn't affect directly your SEO, but will affect in the user time spent and returning rate on your website, which is good for SEO. Notice that a good website design sometimes affect on the page load, so it's important to measure what is your priority.
Click to expand...

This is a very good point to make. Professional presentation of your information is paramount to getting people to come and STAY on your website. If you make the website difficult to navigate by being disorganized, attendees will not be spending much time there. If you want a good example of a professional website Google Incitrio, they are a marketing firm located in Southern California.
 
thanks for this question OP.actually i thought to ask the same question and i'm happy to the see the same question had posted by you in this section.....
 
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