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The Smart Way To Develop

Websites

And the good news is that there’s a method to the madness. Even though search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, online marketing professionals understand the difference between a right approach and a wrong approach to SEO.

Best SEO practices ensure that your techniques are effective and ethical (a must as Google discovers and weeds out processes for cheating the system). At the same time, your site must be easy to use while at the same time reinforcing your branding and simply looking great. If you’re looking to build your website the right way, it must ultimately balance all of those goals.

Not sure where to start? Don’t worry, we have you covered. From things to do even before a single line has been coded to the all-important final checklists, we’re here to help. The following sections offer a detailed path to website development with the dual goals of:

/ An SEO-friendly website designed to make Google, Bing, and other search engines happy

/ A functional, usable website that will effectively engage visitors

You may have heard of search engine optimization (SEO). You may even know what it’s about. But do you know why it’s so important? It’s simple, really — it’s the most common way to get your website found.

Content Management Systems

In the old days of the late 1990s and early 2000s — the Wild West era of the Internet — websites were put up as straight HTML code, and if you wanted to update anything, even correct a typo, you had to edit the code itself.

These days, that’s not necessary thanks to the advent of content management systems (CMS). A CMS acts as the engine for your website, allowing you to create pages, edit text, make blog posts, all from a central dashboard hosted on your web server. For advanced users, a CMS can also install extended features and grant access to coding for all different types of customization. Many CMS platforms are open source, which means they’re free to use while support comes from a large user community. Some of the most popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

Each platform comes with its own set of pros and cons, balancing items like intuitive interactions, plugin library, support community, and server resource usage. It’s important to identify a platform that will scale with your own needs while offering the customizable options for all-important SEO coding (page titles, meta tags, permalink structure, etc.). There’s no cut-and-dry path to selecting a CMS platform — the best thing is to compare features and requirements and decide what works best for you..

Keyword Research

With a CMS platform in place, the next step is to identify which keywords you want to target. This is a critical step that acts as a major development gateway to graphic design, coding, and other such processes. Your target keywords can impact everything from page content to domain name to permalinks, so it’s important to drill down what you want as soon as possible.

To achieve that, you’ll have to take a look at what the world types into search engines like Google and Bing. How often does a particular phrase get searched for? What about its variations? Changing just one small word here or there can open up a door to a world of keyword permutations. Once you have your list, how competitive is each keyword? In other words, how difficult will it be to claim a good ranking with that targeted keyword?

Many free keyword tools are available to both provide keyword ideas and deliver data. One of the best starting points is Google’s free AdWords Keyword Tool, which gives approximate per-month search metrics for keyphrases. This data can be the foundation for your keyword research, allowing you to create lists of potential keywords with hard numbers on variations — you’d be surprised at the difference a plural “s” can make!

If you already have a site, then that’s another good data resource. Your current site’s analytics will provide an up-close look at how people found you. By examining analytics, you can drill down details such as click-through-rate (CTR) on keywords, time on site, pages visited, and conversion rates.

Once you have selected your CMS platform and your keyword research is ready to go, you’re just about ready to talk aesthetics with your graphic designer...but not quite yet.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is an often overlooked step by those who are new to SEO. They may jump the gun by seeing big impression numbers for key phrases, only to later discover that the top rankings are locked in by sites that have claimed them for years. Highly competitive keywords can eat up your time, effort, and money, when other alternatives may provide just as good results without much of the hassle. But the only way to discover this is to perform your due diligence and understand what you’re up against.

How can you take advantage of less-competitive alternatives? Here’s an example. Suppose your primary target gets 10,000 impressions per month but is highly competitive. However, two alternatives get 7,000 impressions per month and aren’t very competitive. Even though the two alternatives have lower individual impressions, the lack of competition means that it will be much easier to achieve a higher ranking — and thus, your cumulative impressions will be greater than if you had attempted to go for your primary target.

Site Architecture

Many people can quickly identify a bad website when they come across one. But what makes a good one? It’s not as simple as just the graphic design or its SEO potential. A strong website is a combination of aesthetics, SEO, and usability:

/ Aesthetics: A good graphic designer can create a strong look based on your branding scheme, all while understanding the specific limitations of web design, such as browser compatibility, image file size optimization.

/ SEO: Proper coding, formatting, tagging, and content writing to optimize for targeted keywords without using unscrupulous means.

/ Usability: Sensible and intuitive interactions, from the menu to call to action to sidebar widgets.

These three elements provide the foundation for your entire website. If they’re lacking, your website will create significant difficulties for users. For example, without good usability, you’ll frustrate visitors and fail to convert them — and without proper SEO, you won’t even get visitors there in the first place.

All of these details should be defined before fully jumping into the build stage. The worst thing you can do is approve a build, only to halt it and undo work due to sweeping changes. Save yourself the grief and lock these down prior to building your site.

Review Analytics

Your current site’s analytics can provide incredible insight into the areas to focus on with your new site. This can be determined from different metrics such as:

/ Keywords: The search terms used to find your site.

/ Time on specific pages: The average time users spent on a particular page — a good way to tell determine which content users liked best.

/ Visitor flow: The footprints of visitors as they moved from page to page, giving you insight regarding call-to-action efficacy.

/ Exit pages: The pages where visitors ultimately left the site. If this is one of your final call-to-action pages, such as a survey or a contact form, then your architecture and content have been effective.

By breaking down this data, further details should come into focus regarding key decisions for your new site. For example, if some pages aren’t getting any traction, is it because they aren’t easy to find or is it because they provide little value for the user? And if you have high-ranking pages, can you maintain those leads by creating proper redirects from the old site to the new site?

It’s easy to dismiss your old site as an artifact, but before you toss it into the virtual recycling bin, be sure to mine all of the analytics data you can. At the very least, you can gather some valuable lessons about how users regard your content. On the other hand, it might give a smarter, more efficient map to getting the most out of your new site.

Staging

If you’re an actor, you don’t want the public to catch a rough cut of your film. If you’re a musician, you don’t want people to hear an unmixed version of your song. And for your website, you definitely don’t want people to find it before it’s ready — especially if that someone is a Google search engine spider.

A proper staging server is an absolute must-have for new website development. This allows a blank canvas for the site to be developed. No site is born overnight; there’s baseline CMS installation, then general architecture, custom graphics, content, custom CSS, multimedia content, and much more. All of this comes in stages, and your site needs to be safely kept from public view as each layer comes together.

It doesn’t matter if your site is ready or not; if it’s accessible to the public on the web — even on a subdomain — then Google will find it. That creates two problems. First, you’ll get people viewing a not-ready-for-primetime site. Second, because Google has already indexed the content, that means that the site on the production server will be cited as duplicate content. If Google indexes your staging site, you could be inadvertently shooting yourself in the SEO foot.

The best way around this is to create a staging site that’s password protected. Free from the prying eyes of the public and Google’s search engine spiders, your site will have the space to evolve the way it needs to.

Design/Development Review

The content is uploaded. The meta tags are in. The graphics are set.

Everything’s ready to go — so it’s time to open the doors to the public, right?

Not so fast. Like all important launches in business — and in life — it’s best to take a step back and do one final review to make sure the site is SEO friendly. Here’s a basic checklist to use:

/ Is the content formatted for SEO (headlines, bold text, etc.)? / Are links logically embedded into the content? / Do meta tags abide by general length restrictions? / Do permalinks use an SEO-friendly structure? / Do image filenames use keywords? / Are there any broken images, dead links, or content typos? / Does the URL structure work for both usability and SEO purposes?

/ Have 301 redirects been setup to capture your old site’s audience?

/ Does your CMS have the latest security updates?

If the answers are all “Yes!” and your site has passed the final sanity check, then it looks like you’re ready to go. It’s time to migrate from staging to production and show the world your beautiful, functional, SEO-friendly, and —- of course — awesome new website.

Final Thoughts

Your website just might be the biggest, most important, investment for your marketing budget. It acts as your brochure and your ambassador. It reinforces your branding while delivering your message. It provides the platform to speak to existing customers while attracting new ones. In short, it’s the hub of your marketing, and something that critical must be developed correctly.

Of course, the launch is just the beginning. An active website increases your search engine footprint, re-engages previous visitors, and brings Google back for more. The first step, though, is to do things right from the very beginning. By following the steps mentioned here, you’re already positioned to succeed. From there, it’s up to you.

Forward Push Media is a full-service website design, development, and SEO firm. Using the WordPress CMS platform, Forward Push can take websites from concept to creation while adhering to SEO best practices and the latest innovations in graphic design and website technology.

Contact us for more info:hello@forwardpushmedia.com(415) 640-8009