What do people think about when designing a website? Do they think about how the site is going to look, its content, links, images on the site or emails? Do people even think about SEO while designing a site? In most cases, the first thing that people think about while designing a website is how it is going to look. People are always worried about how the look of the website will appeal to visitors. The second thing that they may think about is the content on the site.
While the design of the site is important, it is also important to remember why people visit your site. People do not visit your site for its design. In most cases they are there either to buy a product, to check about a service or to get information on some subject.
The first step during developing a website is to determine who is going to visit the site and what they are going to be looking for. It is important to keep in mind that just getting a visitor to your website is not important. It is also important that this visitor remains on the site and visits the site again in the future.
Considering SEO of the site while it is being developed will help you define the purpose of your site and its target audience. It can help you analyze what your competitors have done to rank better in search results. A competitor analysis can give you an idea on what to include and what to leave in your website design. Keyword research can tell you what the target audience is looking for. This is useful in creating content for your site.
SEO while your site is being designed will help you create a content framework. If you have your site scoped out and know what you are going to convey to your target audience, then it becomes easy to create and organize content on the site. Some things to think about while creating the site's content is if you need marketing pages on the site and if you do, then how many pages do you need? Do you need a blog on the site? Do you need articles for SEO? Do you need images, videos, white papers or any other form of content? Keyword research can help you in understanding if you need some or all kinds of above content.
Once the keyword research is done, you can start creating the content for the site. Writing content with SEO in mind will ensure the following. Your target audience will get what they are searching for when they visit your site. Your site will become keyword rich and will rank better in search results and this will result in more business.
Once you have the content ready, you should let it decide the design of your site. A good website design will highlight the right content to the users, makes it accessible to them and guide them towards either a purchase or signing up for something that the site has to offer.
By the time the site reaches the development stage it should have an architecture that meets the needs of the target audience, content that the target audience is looking for and a search engine friendly design.
SEO should be kept in mind even when the site reaches the production stage. Putting SEO first in your website planning process ensures faster page load time and an error free site. Use a search engine friendly code for the website. This will ensure that the users get the right information for the keywords that they search for and will help in increasing your website's ranking in search engines which will further result in better business.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)