Here we will define the process we take to ensure that all aspects in the incorporation of Search Engine Optimization are in place when we launch a website. Naturally, we are not going to list everything we do, but from reading this article, you will be able to launch a website with our firm with confidence that you have crossed your t’s and dotted your i’s.
The biggest issue when developing a new web site, or redesigning an older website for SEO, is the structure of the site itself. We take great pains to map out the structure of the site in advance in order to best take advantage of the natural segmentation of the site. Even the biggest sites on the Internet are segmented into smaller sections. This happens naturally when creating a huge web site, but the main difference between natural segmentation and our SEO segmentation is the internal linking structure.
From the perspective of trained and certified SEO analysts, we learned early on that “siloing” is vital to the creation of a properly optimized site. So, how does this extra segmentation come into play? It actually happens within the “silos”, where any link to another “silo” will only move vertically and never laterally. What are we talking about? The links move vertically? How does that happen? The best way to explain this is to provide a detailed example.
Let’s say you have a company and you sell widgets. You probably do not sell only one type of widget. Therefore, you probably will have different sections on the site pertaining to the different types of widgets. Let’s say that you have different levels of quality in your widgets, different colors, and different sizes. Naturally, you would list all of your highest quality widgets together, with their colors, and sizes. So let’s assume that you have 3 levels of widgets. Basically, you would want to make each of them a separate category. Each widget category would have a two subcategories, size, and color.
Now that we have our categories and subcategories set up, let’s look at the inner linking between the categories. Any one of the categories can link to another category; however, the subcategories should not link to other subcategories. One large high quality blue widget should never link to a lower quality, green widget. Once you get into the subcategories, they should only link to the top level of the other categories. This ensures that the search engine spiders (or robots) will come to your site, see your segmentation, and crawl the entire “silo” before moving on to the next one. This gives you the best opportunity to associate all categories and subcategories in one segment together; giving you the best opportunity to have each of these pages transfer their PageRank to each other and eventually show up in the search engines for the related keyword phrases associated with the categories and subcategories.
Of course, having a site that is completely segmented does not lend itself to being very practical to the customer experience. Therefore, we can overwrite this process by linking between the “silos” using nofollow tags. Essentially, these tags will allow for the segmentation of the site for the search engines, but will also allow for easy navigation throughout the site. Quite convenient isn’t it!
Another key element of proper SEO Web Design is code optimization. We feel that excess code on a site is an unnecessary obstacle to the search engines being able to catch the meat of the page, which is the content. Therefore, we like to eliminate as much code from the page as possible. We do this by making the JavaScript and cascading style sheet (CSS) code external. If these files are kept on the server and included in the page, rather than taking up valuable real estate at the top of the page, then the page should be more appealing to the search engines. We have coined this action as determining the Content to Code Ratio (CCR), being, the amount of content on the page in relation to the amount of code that shows up on the page. We want this ratio to be as low as possible. The lower the ratio, the lower amount of obstacles that stand in the way of the search engines and attaining high rankings. Keep this in mind in selecting your web design or development firm.
In addition to the on page optimization of code, we also work on the off page code. This comes into play when discussing the use of headers and footers throughout the site. We have seen far too many sites that do not have a header and a footer included in their code and each time, we have to basically restructure their site in order to make this next technique possible. We integrate SEO into our Content Management System (CMS), as well, to allow for initial and ongoing management of meta data and heading tags. Why is this important? Well, when you have a website that has 50 pages, 100 pages, or even thousands of pages, how are you going to efficiently manage all of those key areas of optimization for your web presence? It would be impossible without an SEO capable CMS. You don’t want to run the risk of making an error and overwriting your on page code. By integrating our SEO compliant CMS into your website, nearly anyone in your organization can make the changes to the meta and heading tags, and you need not worry about them negatively impacting or even breaking other code on the page. This SEO Content Management System pays off in its risk management benefits alone.
In researching your potential SEO Web Design firm, most importantly you should ask them for experience and references, both of which we’re glad to provide through the quick request form below.
