Best practices / SEO governance in the development and build phase
One of the best SEO tough points for a site is the build process, to make sure things are done right from the beginning. A lot of times that’s not an option, but when it is, take it. Make sure the tags, DOM structure, links, navigation structure, images and content are exactly what the engines want.
With any SEO effort, you need to define your goals and create a plan. Once that is done, you can apply build decisions to those goals and plans. Content is one of the most important features of the site, and luckily that can be fast tracked along side infrastructure build of the site. In most sites, the content is going to be marketing driven, so the deliverables can be separate from the resources needed for the infrastructure build. This will allow faster time lines, and a more efficient build, provided there is strong communication. The infrastructure build team needs to be sure the marketing/content side knows of any limitations to the content, from a length point of view. Tags are also very important, and need to be governed by SEO concerns. Any meta tags and title need to be exposed to the content owners in a CMS or change process. This will enable the needed strong consistency between the the meta data and the page content to remain on target with the page’s keywords. The URL also needs to be owned by the content creator – they need to be able to specify it through a CMS solution or business process. Images are also very important, the build team needs to try to limit the inline images to content related. Otherwise the images can be run in a CSS file in the background of a tag. This will increase the overall relevance of each of the remaining images, and if the file names and alt tags are appropriate, this could significantly help the SEO scoring of the page. Hosting matters. Think trust again. If you host with a ISP that also maintains a lot of domains with low trust, or even fly-by-night domains that employ unethical practices, that will lower your SEO score. Also, it’s important to host your site in the geographic area that you are targeting. Don’t host your site in India if your users are in America. Another strong concern is the navigation structure. You have to use internal links and links to external sources effectively. It’s also very important from an SEO perspective to make sure the site is crawl-able, think how effective can a screen reader use the site. http://www.webbie.org.uk/index.htm In conclusion, if you have a limited amount of SEO dollars in your budget, spend at least a portion of that during the build process to ensure strong natural and organic growth.