Today’s tip will save you from investing thousands of dollars in a website that will never do anything for your business. I should know because I’ve made the
Image via Wikipedia
mistake and I’d hate to see you do the same.
When Building a website for your business, start it with Search Engine Optimisation in mind!
You see in my previous life I owned and ran a training business, and I took it upon myself to get the website built for the business.
Guess what was on my mind? The design, the colours, the fancy corporate copy to make us sound just as big as the other training companies we were competing against.
Not once did it enter my mind to think about how the website was going to be found online, whether we would rank against our competition. Heck I didn’t even realise that I was missing a critical piece to the website which was an understanding of SEO.
It’s the old saying “You don’t know what you don’t know”…and I didn’t have a clue that SEO was even an issue.
It really isn’t that hard
While you are going through the process of choosing your web designers ask them about their experience with SEO and how they can help? If they don’t have a satisfactory answer then move onto the next one.
More and more web designers are hip to the fact that a well optimised website is a critical thing to have and they can value add by offering at least the basics of seo.
They should be able to explain how it all starts with market and keyword research which then leads to optimising your title tags and meta descriptions. Then they should talk to you about the ongoing process of link building to move you up in the search rankings.
If you at least start building your website with SEO in mind then you’ve already done 80% of the work.
Want to learn more?
If you haven’t got enough to do at work and you are keen to learn some more then a good place to start is with the Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimisation by SEOMoz.
Alternatively you can check out some online marketing videos we put together at Traffika.
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Hey I’ve been following your blog for some time now.. completely agree with your article !! keep up the good work !!!