Search Engine Optimization Strategy

What's the Best Time to Do SEO?

As you develop a web site, the order of action really needs to be SEO first, and then site creation. That's because SEO controls the web URL filenames that you use. It dictates the HTML coding techniques that are allowable. Further, SEO guides strategic content development, meaning that if you know what topics you can get a page ranked for, and which are also relevant to your own goals, you can develop web pages on those topics and gain not just additional traffic, but additional relevant traffic.

If any web site pages are created before SEO is performed, those pages will likely be using the wrong web page URL / filename, diminishing the prospects for that page or delivering off topic traffic. If the wrong HTML coding techiques are used, search engine robots may not be able to traverse the site. They can also be misinformed as to what the page is really about.

If any of these situations occur, the page will have to be torn down and at least partially redesigned when SEO is actually performed on the page.

First, an SEO specialist will to talk to you and get a general idea of what you want the site to consist of, what its goals are, how many pages, what the pages are generally about, etc. Then the SEO specialist's job is to go out and do keyword research, competitive website research, run some probability calculations (if not on paper, in their head), and then develop the following list:

SEO Directives

what the page URL should be.
what the page title (in the web browser titlebar) should be.
what the headline text on the page should be.
what the page's keyword and description meta tags will be.
what some of the words and phrases on the page should be.
what text you should use within links to other pages.
what the ALT text for certain images should be.
more...

Next, content text is developed, as well as graphics for the site. The SEO specialist then has to make sure that the web designer uses the right web page programming techniques so SEO is not adversely impacted. All of the information is then as a blueprint to build the site. Graphically and layout wise the web designer has reasonable freedom.

SEO is about getting the search engines to understand about a page and to attempt to control what they think the page is about. Strategically SEO is also about helping to decide what to write about in the first place, based on what people are already searching for.

If SEO is done first, everything else will follow.