Search engine friendly web development should begin with the concept stage of your website. It is much easier to start from scratch with search engine optimization techniques than to attempt to conform to them later. This is due to the fact that many of the most important search engine friendly web development processes have to do with the things that you decide when you first start a website.
The first thing that anyone does in building a web site is deciding what the purpose of the website is. If your website is being built to sell a product or service this is fairly simple and straight forward. However, if your website is to become an information resource that makes its money from Google AdWords and affiliate marketing, you will need to put some extra thought into what your website will be about. In order to get the highest search engine ranking possible and obtain the most profit, you should choose a very specific and profitable topic for these informative websites.
The second thing that you do when building a web site is choose your web site address. It is more than likely that the first URL you come up with is already taken. However, there are many ways to work your keywords and phrases into the address of your web site. This is a very important part of search engine friendly web development, and one that cannot be easily corrected once your site is up and running.
The third thing that you do when building a web site is actually build the site. While this may seem straight forward, there are a few things that you should keep in mind as you build. First, content is the king of search engine optimization. Second, while graphics are cool and add interest to your site they cannot be read by search engines, and should be kept to a minimum. Finally, content within flash and frames cannot be read by search engines.
Do not forget about your product or service descriptions and navigation when you try to use search engine friendly web development either. Pictures of products are great, but don’t put too many on one page. You should also make sure that you have good, two or three sentence descriptive and interesting keyword rich sentences for each product or service description. Also check the search engine friendliness of your shopping cart, as some are more likely to boost rankings than others based on their design.
It is true that you are building your web site more for humans than search engines. However, the basic guidelines for search engine friendly web development are the same guidelines that will keep your site visitors around long enough to fulfill the purpose of your website. Slow loading graphics intensive pages with frames or flash will likely deter people from browsing your website. It will do you no good to raise your search engine ranking if you cannot keep your visitors at your sire once they find it.
