SEO Blog

When you’re looking to create a website, what should come first? Design, content, architecture, SEO? There’s so much to do, how do you fit it all in?

Well, SEO is largely a marketing tool. It’s designed to get good websites to rank where they deserve within the search engines. It’s a way of communicating with their crawlers and saying “hey, this is what my site is all about, these are the services we offer and the keywords that describe what we do”.

Ideally, SEO should be done as soon as you begin planning the architecture of your site. Whilst you won’t need to implement anything too drastic, just picking the titles for various categories and individual pages will end up impacting your website’s position. Ultimately though, the navigation ought to be the first thing done for any site. This will effectively provide a blueprint for your site as it grows.

Once you know what pages fit in where, you can begin filling it with content and an appropriate design. Content is one of the most important aspects of a websites. It must fulfil two integral purposes; 1) inform users, show them how to navigate through and motivate them to use your services 2) optimise the website for key phrases.

Spend time researching keywords and phrases. These hours will later be repaid many times over when it comes to actually developing content, which includes body copy, Meta and headers. Whilst text should read naturally, you need a basic awareness of what words you need to target so that search engines will see that your site is relevant to their searches. It can be a fine line between SEO heavy copy that serves no other purpose other than to help rankings and purposeful text that engages with visitors, both human and robotic.

But before any website’s post-launch SEO can begin in earnest, you need a site that is worth promoting. Using SEO to promote something that is worthless might gain you traffic, but opportunities for long-term success are limited at best.

So whilst SEO is hugely important, blindly blundering in and spending all of your time and effort doing this one aspect of website development won’t always guarantee results. To effectively market anything, you first need a product that people will relate to. You could spend millions promoting your new range of chocolate teapots, but ultimately the product will still fail, regardless of whether the advertising itself was deemed a success.

SEO can be done, to some extent, from the very earliest stages of development on a website. It should be embedded in your navigation and content from day one. In fact the earlier you start, the easier things will be later on when it comes to optimising after launch. But each aspect has to be up to scratch to succeed; architecture, content, design and  SEO all need to be top notch. As long as all are achieved in a logical order, you should be on to a winner.