SEO Learning Center >> Site Development

SEO Web Site Development - Tips for Success

So, you're planning to develop a web site from the ground up, and you want to make sure it's properly designed for SEO and search engine visibility.

Excellent! The best time to learn about search engine optimization is early on in the development process, when you can put the right strategies in place from the start.

Here are some fundamentals of SEO web site development to keep in mind when building your new site. These tips will help you enjoy maximum search engine visibility and traffic levels.

In this SEO lesson, we will discuss such things as web page structure, keyword usage, and content organization. So without further ado:

Use Proper HTML Structure

Most of your web pages should have a title element, an H1 header tag, H2 sub-headers as needed, and a sufficient amount of content rendered as plain text (as opposed to image-based content). This might not be practical for all of the pages of your web site, but it should be applied to any of the content pages you want to rank well.

Search engines need these items in order to determine what your web site is all about — and to display it to a person who is searching that topic. Thus, proper HTML structure is a key ingredient for SEO web site development success.

Build Web Site Content Around SEO Keywords

Your development process should include a thorough round of key phrase research to identify the types of searches being performed by your target audience. This in turn will help you develop your content plan, mentioned below. SEO web site development and keyword-rich content go hand in hand, so don't skip this process.

All you need is a keyword-research tool (like WordTracker or Google's keyword tool), a spreadsheet to list your phrases, and some relevant words to start out with. For example, when I was building the SEO Learning Center, I started with such phrases as "search engine optimization" and then made a list of topics provided by the keyword tool.

Organize Your Content Effectively

Once you've identified the topics for your web site content (based on the key phrase research process mentioned above), you should map out your content plan on paper. By organizing your web site in a logical way and interlinking content accordingly, you are helping your human and search engine visitors at the same time.

Start by asking yourself these questions: How should my pages be arranged? Will I have topic and sub-topic pages, and if so what are they? How will my navigation system tie into my content? How can I make everything accessible to people as well as search engines?

You'll enjoy greater SEO success down the road if you consider these web site development factors early on in the process.

Conclusion

Clearly, these are not the only SEO factors to consider during the development process, but they are some of the most important. These are all factors of onsite optimization — SEO techniques that take place on the web site itself. Once you have these things in place, you can move on to the more advanced techniques of search engine optimization, such as link building and networking.

I hope you've enjoyed this guide to web site development for SEO success, and I wish you well in your online endeavors.