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Director at Raspberry Frog
03 October 2006 09:55am
We are a new agency specialised in delivering user-focused and accessible web solutions to SMEs. We do not currently have the resources to offer SEO but I believe that it must be taken from a very early stage (copywriting?).
If this is the case, we are looking for SEO partners who would be happy to work with us at the early stage of web projects. Further advice very welcome!
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
03 October 2006 10:15am
hi, Nathalie,
yes, it's advantageous to take into account search engines from a very early stage of the project if you're intending to use them as a source of traffic. you mention copywriting which is one early element, but site navigational structure, hosting location, and the choice over what content to include on the site (and where) also all have an impact.
feel free to drop me an email - danielb@brkr.org
CEO at Econsultancy
03 October 2006 13:09pm
Hi Nathalie
You might also want to have a read through my post from last year "From Paper to Page – what’s the ideal web design process?".
This does not give the 'answer' necessarily but it does show just how many things, in an ideal world, you would need to consider pretty early on the process, including SEO.
Regards
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
Director at Raspberry Frog
03 October 2006 13:51pm
Thank you both for your tips and advice. As we do not currently have sufficient resources to provide a good SEO service to our clients at the initial stage of web projects, could anyone recommend someone to us?
MD at Applejack.co.uk Ltd
03 October 2006 15:34pm
Hi Nathalie
If you are going to do SEO properly which means trying to get as many organic listings as possible then SEO starts at the beginning with the site map/structre and continues in the way that the site is constructed. This is particularly important if it is a database driven site as there are a number of issues which specifically effect SEO and which with various techniques can make a great deal of difference. If SEO is not considered at the earliest stage then the level of optimisation which is possible can be seriously impeded.
If you wish to chat further about this then drop me a line
managing director at reverse delta
03 October 2006 16:05pm
I suggest you start with the phrases you want to optimise for and write content about these phrases. This will obviously influence the sitemap for the site, and what the TITLE tags say (the most important part of the page in SEO terms!)
Another important consideration, is to make the site code optimised: make sure you use CSS and DIVs rather than nested tables (this adds effort at this stage but is much better than having to re-write the site later -- and also gets you nearer to being accessible). Make sure all Javascript and CSS code is in external files, to help the SE's get right to the content you want them to use to index your site.
All in all, I think SEO should be one of the first considerations, as some designs and architectures can seriously impede your rankings.
Feel free to contact us for help with SEO - we offer both consulting and development services.
Dave Bancroft
Reverse Delta
www.reversedelta.com
T. 0870 199 3183
Level Studio
03 October 2006 16:40pm
Hi Nathalie, I concur with Applejack. If high organic listings are your vision then you must carry out Keyword analysis from the start of the project otherwise your design could be flawed (for what you want to achieve).
If you need any advice on Keyword analysis please drop me a line at
Tom
Director at Raspberry Frog
03 October 2006 17:09pm
Hi Tom,
I'm going to practise on our site although I don't expect too much as competition is high. I have to admit, I've designed and built the site without paying much attention to the content. I knew that at some stage I would have to rewrite it to optimise my pages. However, took great care in the meta tags, especially Title and the pages names although still working on other pages.
I will contact you when I start workign on the keyphrases. I used WordTracker once, is it still a popular product?
On 16:40:07 3 October 2006 TomMorgan wrote:
managing director at reverse delta
03 October 2006 17:15pm
Remember most SE's ignore meta description and keywords. Description is, however, important as it can improve clickthrough rates as it is usually displayed under your link in the results - the more descriptie, the more likely users will click. The Page TITLE is the most important bit. Try and have one page per keyphrase as it is hard to optimise a page for more than one keyphrase.
Wordtracker is built into Web Position which is a good tool for managing some of the SEO process. Google and Overture Keyword suggestion tools are also useful.
Dave
www.reversedelta.com
On 17:09:16 3 October 2006 NathalieVu-Van-Toan wrote:
Director at Raspberry Frog
03 October 2006 17:29pm
I didn't know that most SEs ignore meta description and keywords. I 've used Web position before for a small site and used the KEI to select the keyphrase. I managed to rank well (top position in Yahoo and MSN) but it took me ages for Google. This site was badly designed (no CSS, no validated HTML, etc) but Web Position seemed to have helped a lot.
The only thing is with Web Position Gold, it makes you write a lot of content to include among other things the keyphrases and it is very SEO driven and not always good for the reader. But I would like to try Web Position again but still unsure if I'd wouldn't be better off optimising the pages without it.
I am reading E-consultancy SEO guide and I'm only at the beginning. Looking forward to finding out how to work on link building. This area sounds like the most difficult one.
Changing subject slightly, a strange thing that happened to our new site is that is was indexed before we indexed it.
On 17:15:29 3 October 2006 davidbancroft wrote: