Designers, myself included, are always trying to prove that good design is worthwhile—I may do it too often here making myself sound like a broken record. When I visit a site to purchase a product, if the site looks like crap, I’ll look elsewhere for that product and even pay a bit more if necessary. The look of a site tells me a lot about the company—and one thing poor design tells me is not to trust the company. Is that a fair assumption to make? In some cases, yes it is but I’d guess in most it’s not. It just means the company in question was looking for a cheap solution but what does that say to the end-user? That’s why when I was looking through SEOmoz’s blog and came across the post “Yes, Virginia, Design can be Link Bait, too,” I was excited that someone outside the industry gets “it.” Anyone with Internet access and a heartbeat knows SEO is a growing industry and more and more people are willing to spend good money for someone to choose the right keywords, the proper titles, good reciprocal links, etc. to generate buzz about their company and to increase their Page Rank. I just wish more SEO “experts” got that good design is good for SEO.

Rand writes:
In all seriousness, though, design is one of the major components of SEO, and if you’re not designing with this class of link builders in mind, you’re not delivering all the SEO value you can deliver, quite frankly. What’s sad is that this is not the knowledge that SEOs seem to spend any time on—while we have caught up with usability, functionality, accessibility and link bait, as a group, the sites you see linked to by SEOs tell a sad story.