Create an SEO Plan before Developing your Website
It is vitally important to make an SEO plan before developing your website and complete those plans before the site is created. Many people do not see the importance of this approach and in many cases SEO is often attempted as an afterthought. What follows outlines the important considerations that must be borne in mind when creating your website.
Analyzing the Competition
- Even before steps are taken to create an SEO plan for the business, careful consideration should be given to the business’ competition. A competitive analysis should be done to determine what the crucial statistics are for your main three competitors in your chosen market.
The following factors of the competitors’ sites should be noted for future reference and for determining the actions you will take in putting your plan together:
- The number of your competitors web pages that are indexed
- What are the page titles
- How many incoming links the websites have
- What are the quality and ranking of the incoming links
- What is the quantity and the quality of the sites content
- How complete is the site’s Mata data
- How user friendly is the site design
- Is there a robot.txt file
First things First
- The development of your website should be done in collaboration with an SEO plan. This will prevent the need for any re-engineering as a result of any changes in SEO requirements.
- Your SEO professional will need to fully explain the process he will follow, the goals to be set to achieve your desired results, and how daily analytics and tracking will be handled.
- You should also look at the visual appeal of your website and determine how it can be optimized to improve its chances of reaching page one of the search engines.
Start Ahead of the Competition
- By incorporating standard SEO practices in the website development stages, you will be freeing yourself from any later need to rework the website to include SEO aspects that were overlooked.
- Also, you will have added a much greater value to your website from the moment it is launched. In this way, you will have the edge over your competition that does not follow the same procedure.
- Also, an effective plan for handling the work that needs to be accomplished should include dealing with those pages that should take priority over others first.
- Not all pages on the website will require the same amount of attention and effort, and the focus should be place on those parts of the site that have a greater value to the business as a whole. For example a product pages that creates a high demand for its products, but for which there are few other competing websites.
- These are the pages that should be given first priority before the focus is turned to lesser valued pages.
- Whatever is decided, a plan to prioritize the work should be decided on and should be consistently followed through the end of the project.
Analyzing Your Site
- The starting position of your website should be documented in the SEO assessment, and the SEO elements of the pages should be listed. The status of these elements at the start of the project, the improvements that are needed, and the completion deadlines should be determined and they should be documented.
- The completion of the tasks should be noted in the documentation as should any need for follow up.
- The elements of the assessment should include an updated and accurate sitemap, site links should be from and to already indexed sites that are related by niche subject, the content of the site should be relevant to the topic of the web site and must be adequate and frequently updated. Also, meta tags should be complete and accurate.
Web page Keywords and Content
- The plan should include a listing of all SEO phrases and keywords that will be incorporated. Use a good keyword tool, such as Google’s AdWords tool, to research the keyword statistics from the very beginning.
- The main keyword phrase should be included in the site’s domain name. Provide pertinent valuable content for your visitors, and while the working of the search engines are important to the success of your website, put the needs of your visitors first and give them the unique and interesting content they deserve.
- A blog can be incorporated into the website’s structure, and crosslinking the two is a good technique to incorporate.
- Be sure to include a sitemap on the website.
These are some of the factors to be considered when incorporating SEO into your website development plans. SEO plays a crucial role in the success of your business website, yet the need to make an SEO plan before developing your website is a concept that many webmasters are not implementing at all.
For additional information on SEO planning you can access many excellent resources online or browse our webpages here for more detailed insight on the topic.
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