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For me, striking a balance between a great website design and seo practicability is one of the biggest headaches I face in the industry. After all, whats the point in spending the time to make a beautiful website that the client and the customer will love, if the potential customers cant find the website in the first place?

Search engines such as Google eat content for breakfast, lunch and dinner and if you cant create that magic recipe then your client is quickly going to start knocking on your door.

So the million dollar question is how do you strike a perfect balance between beautiful web design and brilliant seo? It may sound like a challenging thing but with a little improvisation its more than possible.

Blogs

Blogs are a brilliant way to house a whole load of content without cluttering your website with unnecessary copy.
The fresher the content the better. Blogs always allow you to categorise and organise content into form. They can be even better if you contain all or even a small part of blog posts in your index page. Often a preview of latest posts is enough to keep the index page fresh and rolling high in serps.

Some examples:

Just Host Blog

37 Signals Basecamp Blog

Using Javascript to show/hide content

A brilliant way to keep all that ugly seo rich content is to hide it using something like the jQuery framework and allowing the user to show and hide the content if and when they wish. Search engines will still be able to index this content as its still contained in the markup as its simply just hidden out of view using css.

Although this is a great solution, its important to make sure you dont hide any vital information that the user may miss. After all, the user will only give you a few seconds upon landing on your website before giving up and clicking back.

Some Examples:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Preview Boxes

Preview boxes are a great way to display a small amount of the full content and link the user to ‘read more’ if they wish. This way users are able to find the information they are looking for easier, you still have content for seo and your website is not cluttered. Relevant content images are also a great way of breaking content up and making it not look like an essay.

Some examples:

Apple Macbook Pro

Google Analytics

Striking a balance between design and seo is a fine art and something that you will have to experiment with over time as it can differ from site to site. There are many ways to optimise your website to rank well in serps and well tuned content is just a small chunk of the work involved. Just remember content may be good for seo to increase your websites traffic but good design can help turn that traffic into customers.