Plan an SEO Strategy Prior to Creating a Website

Did you know that less than 5% of business owners planned their SEO strategy before building their website? Why is this so? That is mainly because search engine optimisation is usually not the first thing on small business owners’ minds.

For most small business owners, the usual progression is building the website first, and then attempting search engine optimisation sometime in the future.

This is a completely wrong approach. It’s just similar to creating a product without figuring out first if there’s a market for it and how to reach that market.

SEO and web design are intertwined. In fact, many seasoned web marketers and web design experts can tell you why SEO plays a critical role in your web design and development.

Here are some of the reasons why:

• Google and other search engines can only see text. This means that all images should be optimised with relevant keywords using what is known as alt tags.
• Image sizes also play a crucial role in site load speed. If sizes of your images are too big, they’ll impact the website’s loading speed and rankings negatively.
• Website development tools like macromedia flash aren’t SEO-friendly.
• Title pages need to be keyword-optimised.
• Sitemaps are necessary for indexing all your website pages. Without it, indexing and ranking of inner pages will become slower.

All small business owners build their websites to get maximum web exposure. Since SEO plays a big role in making that happen, it makes sense that their websites be SEO compliant from the start.

This is why SEO is always part of our website designing and building processes. At eTraffic, we help develop and build websites with the goal of generating traffic with high search engine visibility in mind.