Building A Solid Foundation with On-Page SEO

To reference a tried and true (if not over used) analogy…if you’re going to build a house you better have a good solid foundation. The same goes for implementing a solid SEO campaign. As I delineated in previous posts, there are 2 main components of SEO…”On-Page” and “Off-Page”. If you have not optimized your website properly then it’s going to be difficult to have an effective Off-Page campaign which in turn will make it difficult achieve your desired rankings. In affect, you're going to battle with your competitors with one arm tied behind your back.

When should you optimize your website? Well, the most optimal time would be when you’re first building your site. This would be the most efficient time because the coding and structure is being developed and that’s what On-Page optimization is all about…proper coding and proper structure. It’s the same logic as doing the plumbing and electrical work while a house is being built…true those things could be done afterwards but it’s not going to be nearly as efficient.

One thing I’ve noticed is that most web designers and developers offer some sort of SEO service. I have also noticed that, no offense to web designers and I know there are exceptions, most web designers know just enough about SEO to be dangerous. They’ve got some of the basics down but fall far short of optimizing a website to compete for competitive keywords.

I highly recommend having an advisor of some sort, or a company who specializes in SEO, evaluate the skills of your web designer or have them do the SEO themselves as the site is being built. There’s nothing wrong with having one company build your site and another do your SEO…much like a general contractor has a multitude of subcontractors doing various projects on the same house…this is smart in that you get people who are specialized in what they do and end up with a better end result.

What if you have an existing website? Most of you reading this are going to have an existing website and probably don’t know what, if any, optimization was done when you had your site built. What you need to do is have someone run an analysis on your site to determine what has been done and what still needs to be done. Even if the proper optimization was done in the beginning, it’s a good idea to have your site checked because you’ve probably been adding content and links etc. and that will have an affect (positive and negative) on the way the search engine crawlers perceive your site and rank you. I’ll discuss doing “On-Page” SEO on an existing website in my next post. Meanwhile, you can always call me.