Consider Your SEO Before Your Website Build
As an seo specialist I am looking to achieve maximum web optimisation and the highest website ranking for my client. This can be problematic when a client comes to me with old site design where the designer is no longer around to make changes. Older site designs will more than likely require major structural change to achieve a high level of SEO Quite often the client will need to consider reworking the entire website. Problems may also arise if I need to tell the designer of a newly built site that changes need to be made for SEO purposes, a designer can take a critique of their work to heart and one must tread carefully when approaching this relationship.
Pre-considering SEO is a winner for everyone
The best scenario is for a client to consider web optimisation at the time of having a website designed. This will minimise the impact of major change on static parts of the design work. An seo specialist and web designer should be in close contact during the site build to ensure maximum seo is achieved. In the present day more and more web designers are sitting down with seo specialists before the build work begins and working out the best way to optimise the design being considered.
When a site has been designed in a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress for example, changes for the designer are fairly easy to make, but this still depends on the amount of static design work the designer has incorporated into the build. So regardless of how flexible your CMS will be, it is always worth considering SEO before you get started.
Flash could jeopardise your website ranking
A worst case scenario is when a designer has built pretty much the entire website in Flash, and then explains that he heard from X, Y and Z that Flash is index friendly. The bottom line is that Flash is not as easily indexed as HTML, and like all SEO companies we are in the business of web optimisation. Flash makes it harder for a client to achieve a high website ranking and is therefore counterproductive to our mission.
