Why Building SEO into Your Site from Day One is Important
Having a great website is one thing. Getting your site found on Internet search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Bing is quite another.
The key to ranking highly on search engines is to have a website that is search engine optimised (SEO). Essentially, this means that the coding behind each of your site's pages, and the positioning of researched 'keywords' throughout your copy, has all been implemented by experienced professionals.
Choose a Web Designer Who Understands How Search Engines Work
To give yourself a great chance of succeeding online (and also benefiting from everything that social networking for business and powerful link building strategies have to offer), you need a web designer who fully understands how search engines work, and also has a proven track-record in achieving good rankings for sites on the aforementioned search engines (and others). Your designer should know how to ensure that your site is W3C compliant, and also how to create correct 'clean' coding (XHTML/CSS, not tables) meta tags, content, internal linking, and more...
But even then, unless the SEO elements of your website have been put in place before it 'goes live', you will struggle to be found by users searching for your particular type of product or service on the internet. That's why ensuring your site's SEO is built-in from the start is vital.
Why Adding SEO Later Is a Bad Idea
Launching your website before it is 'complete' may cause you to lose a lot of potential business. Not only are you giving your competitors an edge over you on the internet, but you are also setting yourself up for expensive post-launch SEO implementation fees. Why? Because for an SEO expert to effectively build-in the 'clean' coding, meta tags, content, internal linking, etc., they may have to unravel poor coding and existing SEO elements that have been badly or half-heartedly implemented by a less experienced designer, before they can even begin to get to work. This takes time and can be a painstaking, laborious task sometimes involving a complete site recode.
Building In SEO From The Start - What's involved?
Minimising file size - keeping your file sizes to a minimum means your site will load faster.
Simplified coding - including essential code only, and not diluting (and therefore weakening) your important content's efficacy by incorporating code which serves no real purpose at all. This is something that many inexperienced web designers do and must be avoided if your site is going to perform as you'd like it to online. Streamlining your site's coding by moving style and Javascript to external files is a good idea in this regard.
Uncomplicated link navigation - making linking from one page of your site to another as easy and as quick as possible. These days, people are busier than ever. Having to click on endless links one after another to get to the specific page you seek on a website is tiring and can be irritating. Internet users expect to use websites without feeling they are in a maze, or being somehow manipulated. They will click off your site in search of a 'friendlier', less complicated one, if link navigation isn't easy.
Intelligent use of images - irresistible images throughout your web pages are all very well, but search engines like images to be optimised too (through the use of 'alt' tags and other image-optimising techniques). Insist that your web designer optimises every image throughout your site. This way your images will have aesthetic appeal as well as doing a job for you in terms of SEO.
Researched keywords throughout the copy - using a keyword research tool, a professional copywriter will establish which is the most targeted keyword or phrase for your particular product or service, and then strategically position that word throughout your copy, without overdoing it ('keyword stuffing'). Again, this will improve your chances of Google ranking your page highly.
Correct set-up of Title and Meta Description tags - these must also contain researched keywords and phrases, so that when a user searches for your particular type of product or service, your website appears on the Google list in front of them, rather than being so deeply buried in search engines' later pages, you barely have a hope of coming to users' attention. Also, the inclusion of an appropriate keyword in your URL can also improve your chances of ranking highly. Ensure your URL is reasonably short and relevant, however, as this will make it much easier for search engine spiders to index your pages.
Built-In SEO - Insist on it
You can see from the information in this article alone how there is so much more to good website design than pretty pictures and grabby text.
By insisting that the SEO aspect of your website is built-in before your site is launched on the Internet, you are giving yourself your very best chance of achieving good search engine rankings and therefore generating as much traffic to your website as possible. Once users arrive at your website, the next task is to convert them.
But that's another story.
Web Dandy is a web design agency which specialises in accessible web design and development and search engine optimisation. Contact us for more information.
