SEO is the Milk and Cream, not the Chocolate Syrup

Jessica Bowman wrote a good piece today at SearchEngineLand detailing good ways to get SEO involved early on in the web development process. Folks that I work with know that I like to say “SEO is not some kind of chocolate syrup that you can pour on one day before a website launch.” It’s so true. The most successful websites I have developed or worked with have had SEO plans from the beginning. Because content and internal structure are so much a part of SEO success, they must be planned intentionally from the outset.

If I see a site plan that has pages 5 and 6 levels deep, I’m going to propose making the site more flat and explain exactly why. It’s a lot easier to do this on paper than it is once the site has been built, even if it’s still in early construction stages. Of course content is critically important, and should be considered for SEO purposes well in advance. I’m also always very concerned about the site’s navigation and URL structure. These all need to be planned before any design work starts.

There are also items that will be taken care of shortly before launch. My checklist always includes setting up the necessaril redirects, getting the robots.txt ready, and ensuring a page to URL ratio of 1:1 (no duplicate content).

Next time you consider an extreme website makeover, do yourself a favor and hire an SEO consultant to join the process. Your boss will thank you later.