Balancing Functionality and SEO in Website Development

I wish I had $3.75, so I could at least buy a gallon of gas, for every time we’ve met with a prospective client that just had a new website built, only to find it was nowhere to be found on the search engines. The websites were generally well branded, had a good look & feel, were easy to maintain, and maybe even employed some creative conversion tactics. The problem was that no one considered the search engine compatibility of the site during the entire design process. So, how can this be avoided?

First of all, it is critical that your SEO firm be on the website development team from the beginning. Not only should they provide you with a list of Best Practices that can be used to guide the other participants, but they should also act as consultants to you and the team with regard to what the search engines view as important aspects of site design. Here are a few critical elements:

1. Site Structure your website needs to be completely visible to search engine spiders so they can index and rank your web pages. In general terms, this means text links, text content, proper meta information and heading tags, externally referenced scripts and clean code. It also means your site should be W3C compliant.

2. Static Looking URLs the URLs throughout your website should be devoid of unfriendly parameters, particularly session IDs which contain the dreaded  followed by long catalog numbers. It isn’t that spiders can’t read these parameters, it’s just that they don’t tend to rank them very highly. Many times, content management or shopping cart programs will automatically generate these types of URLs so you have to be careful.

3. Themes the content on your website should be divided into themes that can support the natural use of the keywords for which you’d like to be ranked. A theme would typically have a main landing page devoted to a broad term and then several sub-pages with related, but more specific, information.

4. Copy if you want to be ranked for a specific keyword term, you must use that term within the copy on your site. How many times you use the term, and how many overall words of text copy you need, can be determined by your SEO firm through competitive analysis. But, you should figure that the more competitive a term, the more support you’ll need in terms of copy.

There are, of course, more issues to be addressed, but these are the critical ones that tend to bump heads with other design elements. Now, this is not to say that only SEO issues need to be considered. If taken to the extreme, a completely search engine compatible website could negatively affect the look & feel of the site and could make the site cumbersome for your visitors. There are many ways to approach every issue and there are perfectly sound compromises that can be developed. You just need to make sure that SEO has a voice in the discussion from the very beginning.