SEO Your Website First, Design Later

[thejenn]

Authored by: Stoney deGeyter

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/007102.html

A Snippet:

Before developing your website, picking your design and development should be secondary to bringing your optimization and marketing team onboard. The marketing team can help you interview and select the right designers saving both time and money in the long run.

[dhundee]

i've been quite doing something like these, trying to initilialize a site for SEO first before doing any GUI, although i think that's considered part of the design phase in what we could call designing your information for the market

so what i ussually do is to embed site contents, initially on the web, research and fill in text contents, design navigation then start with the graphical design after whenever the contents are ready.

another good thing about doing this is making it easier for you to create a good concept on the graphical layout of the site.

[torka]

I like that the author takes it perhaps a step beyond simply "SEO" but includes the overall marketing plan.

A big usability issue for corporate and business web sites is that too often, the site is organized around the business's organizational chart, not around the needs of the customers.

For instance, at my "day job," we have a product line that is used by many small businesses. Some of the products we make ourselves; others we purchase from other manufacturers and distribute. When I arrived, our product listings on the web site were actually divided into two categories: the products we made ourselves in one category and the products we purchased and distributed were in another, separate category.

This was despite the fact that all these products perform essentially the same function, are sold through the same channels and appeal to the same target market. The only difference between one and another was in the specific feature set and the external appearance. Oh, yeah, and where we got them from (a difference which was invisible and irrelevant to the end purchaser).

One of the first things I did when I arrived was to combine them into a single category including all these related products. Customers were confused over why they were in different categories and often overlooked appropriate choices because the product was in the "wrong" category. Putting them all together solved that problem. (Made site maintenance easier, too, since I no longer had to try to remember which category which product belonged in! )

Fortunately, it was an easy change to make. I realize things could have been a lot worse.

Involving marketing in the planning from the get-go can help prevent all sorts of customer-unfriendly, SE-unfriendly or marketing-unfriendly design decisions from being implemented.

--Torka