It’s often hard for business owners to understand why they need to have professional SEO’s involved in website design or redesign almost from the moment of conception. They tend to think that Search Engine Optimization something that can easily be added on after their website is completed. While this may work okay for some businesses in less competitive spaces, when the stakes are high those that take this approach are doomed to struggle playing catch up to those taking a more wholistic approach.
As an example, we recently had a developer come to us at the initial stage of website redesign for our optimization expertise. She had a wireframe of what she and her customer envisioned for his new site. We were able to guide the site structure to show the Search Engines which pages were the most important; we suggested new pages to include on the site based on our keyword research; and we advised that certain pages be dropped from the design for various reasons. These changes will make the overall website optimization much more effective as we move forward.
If we hadn’t become involved at the first stages of the design process, the overall optimization would be weaker and changes requiring additional time and expense would likely need to be made later.
Here’s a great article from SEOMoz that can help you explain to your clients the importance of incorporating SEO into web design from the ground up: Reversing the SEO Process-The Chocolate Cookie Mistake.
