When developing a new site there are many important factors to decide when creating the blueprint for greatness. There must be a quality look, feel, and navigation to the site. You must decide on the colors, photos to add, dynamic or non, and so much more.
What many design teams tend to forget or push to the back burner is site optimization. What good is a great looking website if it doesn't even show up in the major search engines.
I suggest if you have the opportunity to optimize in the beginning, don't hesitate just do it. As you will easily see that waiting until later can be much more difficult than you can imagine.
How do you add SEO into the first stage of your web design?
You start with the subject of your company. If you sell widgets, than do research on other companies selling widgets to see how they are placing and what keywords that are using to do so.
Second, find some one in your company that has great writing skills outsource the content writing to a contractor. The more unique and in-depth your content is will determine how your site is seen by the search engines as they crawl your site for indexing.
Third, add meta tags to all your pages and make sure that your main keywords are in the title, description, and keyword tags. Also, make sure that your page content has a few of the main keywords spread through out as there must be relevance between your meta tags and content.
Fourth, add alt tags to your pictures on the page. Make sure that the alt information describes the picture and try to use keywords in it.
If you follow these easy steps when creating a new site, it will save you a lot of heading later. Trying to change content in a particular lay out can almost be impossible, so do it right the first time.
