You might be asking yourself, “what the hell is this responsive web design?!”. Responsive web design is the term given to a certain way that a website is designed and built. Back in the day, the accustomed way for you to expose your online presence to as many people as possible, would be to create multiple versions of your website. One for PC and the other for mobile phones. A website that has a responsive web design, can adapt to any platform or screen size. Menu’s are organised and images are automatically re-sized. Microsoft is a brilliant example of a website that uses responsive design.

How does responsive web design impact SEO?

Right, so you know what responsive web design is. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty and talk about the effects on Search Engine Optimisation.

I would like to be as fair as possible when I weigh the pro’s and con’s but to be totally honest, the pro’s definitely out-weigh the con’s. Let’s start with the Pro’s:

More user friendly

When a visitor lands on your website, it is safe to assume everything is in working order. No broken navigation or misplaced images. Everything pops into place, leaving a clean, easy to use website.

Link building is easier

When you are building your link profile, your focus will be in a single place. Remember that your mobi site is now your main site as well. Link building will become easier to manage when you don’t have to worry about a secondary mobi site.

Decreased bounce rate

If you have a website that is not tablet or iPad friendly, the bounce rate from those visits will generally be high. With a responsive website design, and a single multi platform landing page for your visitors, you will see a decreased bounce rate from these visitors.

Now let’s get down to the Con’s…

Set up time and expense

Shifting to a responsive design is a great task. It takes considerable more effort and time to implement. The designers and the developers are tasked with creating a smooth user experience.

Larger pages

This is a huge topic of discussion at the moment. Are the large pages worth the risk? Both for Google and visitor usability.

This will be up to you to decide.

The answer to this question is to focus any efforts on content marketing rather than a pure link building strategy. This can easily be achieved by targeting your content marketing into quality communities such as blogs, social media platforms and forums. Using a variety of link baiting techniques, successful and natural “link building” is achieved without focusing purely on link building as a whole.

In conclusion, your internet marketing strategy should focus primarily on good, quality content with clean and natural content distribution platforms. With quality content, you will find that link building will become automatic and natural as long as your content stays relevant to your targeted communities.