Starting Your SEO and Website Design Simultaneously
Many companies overlook the importance of starting search engine optimization (SEO) from the beginning stages of their initial web design or redesign. It may seem like it takes you more time and more money in the beginning to integrate the two simultaneously, but it will save you loads of time and money in the long run.
3 Common mistakes people make when designing a website with SEO as an afterthought:
1.) Your URLs are not SEO friendly. With no thought to the keyword or phrase that you are targeting, you are not assigning the proper SEO friendly URLs needed to help your site rank. There are way too many websites out there with awful URLs. These URLs usually have strings of numbers, letters, or keywords that are completely irrelevant to the page and the targeted keywords. They provide absolutely no value in the SEO world. Sure there are ways that you can fix them. But redesigning or redirecting a page will be a big pain and you will wish that you had an SEO plan in place at the time your website was being designed.
2.) Your irrelevant content won’t rank. If content adds no relevancy to the keyword or phrase that you are targeting to get ranked in the search engines, search engines won’t view it as important enough to rank. If you get your content right the first time, and it is fully optimized for your targeted keyword and phrases, you will be saving yourself valuable time and your website you will see better results. When search engines crawl your site, they are looking for search queries that you site matches. Therefore your content needs to be written around the search queries you want your customers to use to find you. Your keywords also need to be used in the titles on pages, in the navigation, as well as in the ALT tags. Many people over look these critical parts. If you missed the boat on writing content that supports your keywords and key phrases when you designed your website, you will have to rewrite or create new pages.
3.) Your internal linking structure is non existent. If you have a proper internal linking structure in place, it will help your website visitors move throughout your website, spending more time your website, increasing your conversion rate. If you have linked related pages together, your visitors will be able to find all of the information they need and they will be more likely to contact you or purchase from you. This spreads link juice throughout your website and is good for SEO. If your website has a poor linking structure, chances are your visitors won’t stay on your website long and will move on to the next site.
