The Biggest SEO Mistake You Can Make when Redesigning Your Website

Aug. 25, 2010

Under: SEO

Pencil Crayons for Design Proper search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of every web marketing strategy (or it should be) but many times optimizing a website is seen as an afterthought to design when a company is trying to revamp its website. When it comes to designing a website that will be optimized from the get-go, it is essential that your company’s marketing team be involved from conceptualization straight through to launch. Why is this? Well that’s where we come to of part 1 our biggest website redesign mistake with regards to SEO.

Part 1: Leaving your website’s SEO until the website is already designed.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sunburnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for trying to implement SEO once your website has alrady been designed and built.

When your SEO is done properly, it helps you to determine the type of content that should be present on your site to help it rank well in search engines from the time it launches onwards, and, realistically, you shouldn’t be designing a website if you don’t know what content will be on it, right? Now, we’re not saying that you should design your website specifically around the keywords you’ve determined it will be easier to rank for during keyword research. What we’re saying is that determining how your customers find you and what they are looking for on websites in your industry is an important step in determining what content will be present on your website, and, depending on what kind of content your site needs to appeal to your target audience, your design will probably change to reflect that. This might sound like a relatively straight forward idea, you might even think this is a no-brainer, but you have no idea how many times we’ve seen companies come to us looking for some SEO consulting help, only for us to realize that they’ve built their entire website without once taking SEO into consideration. They have essentially built their website on a weak foundation. In addition, there is always the danger that if your website designer has no experience with SEO, then they won’t have designed or built your site in such a way that you can implement optimization tactics successfully without paying them for further development.

Part 2: Having your design firm do your SEO for you.

In an ever diversifying web design market there are many design firms that have marketing consultants or even designers with a strong SEO background on their teams who can successfully implement your SEO strategy. What I mean by this isn't that a design firm can't implement an SEO strategy for you, Marqui for instance designs and builds sites, but we also have a full consulting team to ensure that your website is SEO ready from the beginning, and we can even do your SEO continually for you if that’s what you want. What I'm saying is that since your SEO should be an ongoing process, it's important that it doesn't end with your site being launched. Whether your website design team has the experience or not, having them implement your SEO for you is only the beginning and it’s important that your internal web team knows that, which is one of the main reasons we suggest having marketing involved from the start of your redesign project.

Image by Freek Van Den Bergh on Flickr

Posted by Amberlie Denny at August 25, 2010 8:00 AM