18 Simple SEO Items Commonly Missed in Web Development
One of the things we constantly have to do as SEO experts is give recommendations to companies on how they need to change their site so that they can be better optimized.
The sad thing is that a lot of the things we recommend should have been done during the Web development phase the first time around.
No matter how much the SEO world tries to get the information out there, a lot of Web developers don’t understand the basic concepts of SEO. This in turn leads to sites being developed that an SEO team will later have to tear apart and fix.
So whether you’re designing a new site in-house, using some kind of template site-building system, or hiring an outside firm, here are 18 things that you’ll want to make sure are in place before you launch your site. It will keep us SEO guys from giving your site an overhaul later. By following these guidelines you’ll have a much more search engine friendly web design from the beginning.
1- Perform Keyword Research Before Developing the Site
SEO starts with keywords. And if you’re planning to market your site in the search engines, you should know what keywords you want to rank for before you even start building the site. Make sure this is done FIRST.
Here are some other posts that talk about how to properly do keyword research:
Keyword Research Gems from PubConHow to Create a Huge Keyword ListUse All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy2- Put Non-www to www Redirects in Place
It amazes me how many sites load with and without the www in the URL. The problem with this is that it creates an automatic duplicate of your site, and can waste a lot of link value as people link to both versions. Decide which version of your URLs you want to use, then 301 redirect everything else to the preferred version.
3- Use a Static, Keyword Based URL Structure
Dynamic URLs can cause a lot of problems if not handled right. So rather than going through all of the headache that they cause us SEO-types, just set your site up with good URL rewrites so that you don’t have dynamic URLs in the first place.
More posts about URLs:
Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix ThemAbsolute URLs
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