Internet marketing and search engine optimization can be tough to understand. One of the most common problems we hear from prospective clients is something like this "we spent all this money with XYZ design firm for this great looking site, but we aren't making any money..."
The problem is not the design per-se but the business approach that was used in building the site. If you are building a new website or redesigning an old one, you should follow these simple rules:
Never build a new website without first defining the business objectives of the website. You should ask yourself what is the website suppose to do for your business, how is it going to do it, how are you going to measure the success of the site.
Bake Search Engine Friendliness Into Your Website
We call adding search engine optimization into the architecture, taxonomy and link structure "baking in the SEO". We can bake the SEO in after you have designed a site, but it is easier and cheaper for us to bake it before you design the site.
To bake in the SEO we simply build/change your site to be user friendly and search engine friendly. From the taxonomy to the link structure everything should be built for easy access to humans and search robots or spiders. The larger your website and the more content or products you have the more important taxonomy and link structure become.
The link structure should be laid out in such a fashion that your most important content is always a single click from anywhere on the site. This allows your website users quick access to your important content and it allows the search engines quick access to this crucial content as well. As a rule, if something is linked from the home page it is important, if something is linked from multiple pages on the site it is more important. This is one of the most simple rules that is violated by design firms.
A detailed discussion of taxonomy and search engine optimization will continue on this page in the coming days.