I am often amazed by how many companies miss out on the opportunity to build fundamental search engine optimization practices into their website redesign projects.
In my experience, there is almost always a focus on:
- creative design and layout
- professional copy written content
- web development and launch
It saddens me because online marketing tactics seem to get pushed to the back burner when we work on website (re)design projects.
In a perfect world, each of the pieces above (creative, copy, development) would have an online marketing influence in them to ensure that SEO best practices are used during all phases of the redesign.
During the creative / layout phase, SEO would be incorporated by working with the creative teams so that they understand that:
- page headings should be in text rather than an image, if possible
- navigation components should not be driven by heavy graphics and images
- flash items should have alternate content that can display
During the copy writing phase, SEO would be incorporated by working with the copy teams so that they understand that:
- there are keywords and keyword variations that should be used in the content for each page
- there is a need to use certain keywords and that this is not meant to undermine their copy
- page titles and page descriptions should use specific keywords and keyword phrases also
During the development phase, SEO would be incorporated by working with the web dev teams so that they understand that:
-
there are specific architectural improvements that can augment SEO such as
- file naming conventions and directory structure
- URL rewriting for dynamic URLs
- setting up 301 redirects from old URLs to new URLs
- there are specific code improvements that can augment SEO such as
- using clean HTML
- avoiding javascript for changing page content and for site navigation
- offloading script and styles into external files
- using heading tags and text emphasis
Unfortunately, though, the above does not take place. Instead, the site is built and ends up looking great, but doesn’t rank for the right keywords — or even worse, doesn’t even show up in the search engines. The worse part is that it takes way more effort and way more resources to add those search engine optimization practices into the site after it has launched already.
My suggestion is to make sure that all of the key stakeholders in a project have knowledge of what SEO requires for each phase of the site’s development and the benefits of focusing on SEO (or consequences of ignoring SEO) are.
It may be an uphill battle, but it will be worth it down the road.
