Think of SEO Before Developing Your Website!

Howdy, I am Aditya, a Business Analyst at rtCamp. In my recent client interactions, I found many entrepreneurs insisting for turnkey SEO solution for their product. They were amazed, when I tried explaining them “How SEO was part of standard theme development at rtCamp” & why they should opt for SEO at development stage itself. Then, I thought hang-on I try explaining the same thing to every second guy siting in corner offices of Manhattan! So I followed my colleague’s footsteps, to address our approach below.

What is SEO?

SEO in our terms is an art of reducing gap between your site and its target audience. It’s a process of making your website easily searchable (to relevant keywords) by structuring your website navigation in user-friendly manner. Remember if the user is happy, you get more page views & less bounce rates. So you keep good content and we will handle the rest!

Why Use SEO in Development stage itself? (earlier the better)

You are planning to launch a new site or redesign the current one. We can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. Why From bottom up? I might as well hire some dude who charges me $5k a month and get my site in top rankings! : HMMM… No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Google also keeps its organic search isolated from its revenue model. So be wary of SEO firms that make baseless promises. 

Our tried & tested process:

1. We implement all the basic and recommended SEO Practices in development stage itself!
2. Permalinks: %Postname% This is the most popular permalink structure among wordpress users, and it is perfect as long as you can include your keywords in your post titles. Short and keyword rich urls are best for SEO.
3. Adding Alt tags to images: This allows Google Bots to learn characteristics about the image (example: <img src=”iPhone5.jpg” alt=”iPhone 5 black colour”).
4. We install and configure recommended SEO plugin. This provides you title, meta keywords, meta description fields along with each page/post. This helps user to easily add title and description about the post/page from backend. For example Google uses the description meta to show the short description when page is listed in search result. Check image below:

You may see the meta description in the search result for our page. We also create global meta tags for posts, products, media, forums, topics, discussions, product categories & product tags. Plugins & Tools we use:

• WordPress-SEO plugin by Yoast
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recipeseo/

That is why it is important to keep the SEO strategy in mind right from the development stage. What do you think? Do let us know your thoughts.