Planning SEO Prior to Building a Website

So today instead of ranting about dodgy SEO firms… let’s talk a bit more about SEO tips

A common mistake made by many small Australia businesses is to have a website designed without carefully considering their SEO strategy.  They build, add the content, wait for traffic and then… oooppsss may be we need to speak with someone about SEO.

SEO is all too often left as a task to accomplish after the rollout of a website.

In this scenario, a site will get rolled out and then the business will seek to hire an SEO consultant so that it can get ranked highly in the various search engines.

The SEO consultant they consider (hopefully me!) will look at the site and realize that it will take numerous changes to get it SEO friendly.
This can be a costly mistake specially if you paid to develop a site, where the structure  or the code, makes onsite SEO very difficult….

So guys: In order to avoid making this mistake, you should always plan SEO prior to building your website because the design can be easily altered in the early stages.

To begin with, it is critical to first decide on the purpose and goals of your website.

When planning SEO, first identify what products or services you are hoping to sell by establishing your website. But more than just sales, you also want other websites to link to yours. In order to do this, ask yourself what you can do to make your website attractive so that others will naturally want to link to it. Remember that search engines usually evaluate your site in relation to how many other sites link to it.

The higher this number, the more a search engine ranks your site’s value and importance. (So once again… is allllll in the link building) If you are bored… go and do more link building…

Decide the “words” that potential customers will use to find your website. These are known in the geek-SEO world as keywords.

The process involves writing down all of the possible words you think your target market customers will use in a search engine in order to try and find your website.

A factor that comes into the playing field when determining what keywords to use is competition. If your website is in a competitive niche market, then your aim is to try and narrow down the domain of potential users searching for your site. One way this is done is by choosing keywords along with the geographical region that applies to your target market. For example, if your website provides landscaping services in the Dallas area, you can use the keyword phrase “Dallas landscapers.”

• Plan how the site will be organized.

This is more than just laying out the navigational map. One area to focus on for organization is identifying the keywords that will bring you higher traffic.
In other words, if using a keyword analysis tool (like Google’s keyword suggestion tool), you will find that there will be many other suggested keywords related to your main ones. You should gather all of these keywords and pick the most popular. Your site should then be organized to focus on these keywords first which means initially gearing your content towards them. The remaining words should be given a lower level of focus.

• Choose a domain name that benefits your SEO efforts.

Recommendations are to try to use a domain name with one of your main keywords combined with another word that identifies your brand.

For example, let’s say that your business sells customized auto parts and your brand name is Brand X. A simple way to create a domain name that is SEO-friendly might be to combine the words “auto parts” with “Brand X” to arrive at brandxautoparts.com.au .

Although this is a simplified example, the point is that you should carefully craft your domain name to provide an easy way for customers to recognize it as well as providing indexing information to search engines.

If you need more info, check my SEO Training site

We have more SEO Ninja Posts right here

• February 26, 2011 -- Technical considerations that should be driven by SEO