Search optimisation is so much more involved and it starts with a good well designed / coded website structure that is friendly to humans and search engines alike. Up until recently search optimisation was an after thought and many try to implement there search strategy after they have built there site. This is normally very bad and a costly exercise if you are committed to your search strategy as you may need to redevelop large parts of your site.

Many SEO consultants skip this step as its to hard to convince there client that they may need to rebuild there website. Its sometimes easier to spend more on cost per click campaigns than it is to redevelop a site. Unfortunately site design and cost per click campaigns are closely related. I can totally understand this but if you don't do it right and you competitor does you are already behind.

If the site structure is not to bad you may get away with just redeveloping small elements of the site which should have a big impact on overall search results so its not always bad.

These are the main reasons your site needs to be structured right.

• It will go along way to achieve good organic search results in Google
• It will help drive your Google ad-words campaign cost per click down
• And most importantly it will help users find what they are after on the site

Tips to designing a site for search marketing

Most web developers will often tell you that the also are experts in SEO. This is very rarely true. Building a site for search can take time depending on the complexities of the site. If you are lucky enough to find a developer that really understands SEO then you have done well. What you probably should do is get someone in to work with the developers to ensure that the structure is search friendly.

Make sure the actual web designer is really good (the person that designs the look and feel of the website and also builds the HTML templates for the web developers). What i mean by this is not only does the designer need to understand user behavior to help build a user friendly site. They also need to have a very clean coding style with excellent CSS / mark up skills. If they are any good they should also understand SEO best practices for site design. If they don't it is easy for an SEO specialist to help them.

When it comes to developers normally you get what you pay for. This does not mean you should go for the most expensive developer either as that may also be a disaster. You need to make sure that the developers have experience in developing websites with SEO in mind.

This a basic list of questions that should give you some idea of there knowledge and experience when it comes to site optimisation.

How do they handle dynamic url's? Every single page on the site should have a unique url that is easy to under stand and helps tell the search engines what the page is about. So instead of have a url that reads www.YOURsite.com/ad345538stuffhere888 . It would read www.YOURsite.com/Nice-URL-Title

Do you have the ability to manage Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and keywords from the CMS (content management system). This is hugely important to let Google know what the them of the page is.

Can they build template to populate the Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Keywords and content for less important pages or shopping cart pages by using sections of the database to piece together content? (its also important the the database is structured correctly to help this). This is important if you have a very big site (500+ pages). If they cant do this you will need to right Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Keywords and content for every single page.

Are they building you a custom website our using open source solutions like Joomla or Dot Net Nuke ? If they are using an open source solution there a many add on components that can help with SEO. Open source and components are not always to most SEO friendly but done right it can be pretty good. The other thing to take into account with open source is that it should not cost more than around $10,000 tops (really should be much less if they are not customising anything)

If you require a shopping cart make sure that they use the right one. You may need to do some research here or get someone in that knows which ones are best based on what you want to achieve. Many shopping carts need allot of customisation to be SEO friendly. Just cause the say they are SEO friendly does not mean they are.

Can there web designer produce clean mark up and build valid xhtml pages? This means no ugly tables tags inside the code, optimisation of source code to ensure that the they use minimal lines of code to build the pages. This makes it easier for search engine robots to find your content.

Define your goals and spell out exactly what you want. Don't leave anything to the imagination or you will end up with something thats not right. In many cases this is not the developers fault. Generally developers are good a putting things together but not necessarily that good at coming up with the best way to do things. A good web designer can help hugely in this process as they can show what things should look like and if the understand UI (User Interfaces) they well be able to help with website workflows as well. If you have a good plan it will help.

Thats it for now.

SEO Basics Part two – Building Keyword List for your Site