Often times, it becomes a questionable thought whether design matter in seo and indexing rate. Often times people double guess themselves and leave the design part out. Often because a quality design costs alot. Perhaps, that is a personal choice, but in reality does it matter or not?

This question was raised by a MOG at Digitalpoint:

I believe that YES the design matters in increasing the index rate and a better SEO. A smart SEO Company once taken a project, make adjustments toward the design and how the content is organized to shape it in a way so it is both user-friendly and Search engine friendly. While many webmasters due to various reasons could not get unique custom seo-friendly designs, but here are some advices that you might want to be looking into unique, or free designs when you get them.

Believe it or not, but the design does not have to be tableless. It helps the bot crawl faster if the site is tableless, but the structure of the content matters the most. Using the effective <h2><h3> tags respectively plays an essential role when you have the content organized.

In all cases of design how ever it looks, in the coding, the content should appear above everything, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the sidebar. Why? Because sidebar tends to contain multiple links, Site Navigation link, Sponsor links, Partner links, and such.

Even if the design is coded completely tableless, it can have the sidebar before the content. Various ways to go about it and fix this issue. Always keep the content on the left side and sidebar on the right side and that solves the problem easily eh. Make sure when inserting the <td> or <div> it comes after the content <td> or <div> tags.

We can’t all have sidebars on the left hand side, because then all websites will look the same. Well now you need a good designer because their creative minds work miracles. They can have the sidebar on the left side using the div properties, or the Master Table law to make the design SEO Friendly. In all cases you must have a valid .css file. To check the validation feel free to use the w3 services because they exist for a reson.