If a site seems drab and visually unappealing, it’s to be expected that a person’s time on that page will be very short. That wonderful article or landing page you labored over for hours sits languishing online like a fish out of water.

Now if you’re exclusively a content developer like me, you don’t have to know all the ins and outs of good design. What you do have to understand are some basic fundamentals of what works and what doesn’t so you can be sure that great content you develop shines to its full potential. And knowing it helps when you’re working with a web designer either on your own team or with another company.

Continue reading for some good general guidelines of organization, formatting and designing your web pages. These tips were part of a whitepaper entitled Best Practices for Conversion: The New Engagement Funnel in 7 Steps.

1. Scrutinize your competition

Go through your competitor’s web pages and look at their copy and layout. Document places you feel stumped and then compare this page with yours. Revise or eliminate sections to make yours better.

2. Place most critical page elements within the first 300 pixels

According to usability research from many sources, over half of site visitors do not look “below the fold.” Therefore, get right to the point and keep your value proposition within your screen’s first view.

3. Keep your layout simple

Increase reader comprehension by using a one-column format with ample margins and white space. Limit paragraphs to five lines…dense copy discourages reading. Simple layouts are also more conducive to search engine crawlers and in turn, rankings.

4. Be obvious and use standard usage conventions

Site visitors shouldn’t have to think very much to understand your message and how to use your page. Be clear when describing links and use a standard underline format when linking to another page, like your shopping cart for example.

5. Make sure your page loads quickly

If a page isn’t loading quickly, most visitors will get frustrated and leave – and the more ‘junk’ you have on a page, the longer it will take to load. You should strive for no more than 8 seconds on a dial-up connection (yes, there are many people who still use dial-up to get online.)

Learn more about these and other elements to consider when designing your landing pages. Remember, your landing page is potentially the last place your visitors will see before purchasing. If your goal is lead generation, it’s step 2 in the process. It doesn’t matter if there are only a couple steps or many in your marketing funnel, your landing page needs to excite visitors and build confidence in your products/services and company.

But the fact is graphic design, or site architecture more specifically, is just as important a component to consider when optimizing your site for the search engines as anything else. A page’s architecture elements, if incorrect, will prevent your site’s content from being crawled by the search engines.

So in essence, site architecture is the most important element. If the search engine spider cannot catalog your content, your search engine rankings will indeed suffer.

Many website graphic designers out there may have creative and technical skill to build you a premier looking website – but if they’re not familiar with SEO and how to factor that into your design, you will probably be pretty disappointed with your site’s performance.

Elements like frames, flash and javascript can be disastrous for your website from a search engine optimization perspective.

There are too many items to detail here in one post. That’s why a new section, Site Architecture, is being added to the search engine optimization e-blog. This post is to get you thinking about site architecture/graphic design and the vital role it plays in building your site’s search engine rankings.

Check back often for new posts on this subject. It’s being mixed in with everything else so don’t expect much in the beginning. But as time goes along, we hope to be the one-stop source for all things SEO, including graphics.