How to implement SEO in your Website strategy from the beginning

This guide explains how to implement SEO in your website strategy at the very beginning. Learn about keyword strategies, domain name selection, website and URL structure, SEO design and link building campaigns.

This article is featured in the iGB Affiliate Magazine.

SEO is undeniably beneficial after a website has been built, but the implementation of SEO in the process of creation of a new website is far more effective. As in real life we would like to make a good first impression, our websites should make a good one themselves when the search engine crawlers visit them for the first time.

All what is done wrong at the beginning has to be corrected later, which will cost more money, resources and time and sometimes it is needed to make some detours to get the website on the right path to rank well, which is obviously only a second best solution.

The beginning – Creating a plan for your website

Usually new websites are created to generate income. Make sure that you are unique, that you do something better than your competition, be special. When you have your idea, the next step should be to plan your website structure and here is where we start to talk about implementing SEO strategies.

Keyword Strategies

Lets say you have target a niche market in gambling like “Live Blackjack Casinos” and you are thinking about “what will the user type in to find me”, you will get to the conclusion that there are a lot of possibilities. Lets consider you are not alone in this market and there are older websites ranking number one for the “best” generic keywords. One strategy might be to target with your home these keywords, but more on a long term and focus on longer keywords, where it should be easier to achieve relatively fast good rankings. By working out your keyword strategy you have your roadmap for the future site structure of your website, including your future thoughts and goals. Keep always in mind that your website will develop further when it grows naturally.

Domain Name – Choosing the right domain

There are a lot of different opinions about choosing the right domain. You have a lot of choices, for example getting a keyword domain (live-blackjack-casinos.com), getting an expired domain, a domain that has already been live, to use his history to get maybe a faster start, or register a new domain and brand it (lbjack.com). One special recommendation, I would get up a starting page with a text describing what you want to develop on your domain up as soon as possible. Having this you can already start building up some links and get your website some history.

Website structure

Having done your keyword research you now know where you want to start, what content should your page have from the beginning on and what sections might be added in the future.

Try to think in categories to structure your content:

Cars
Sports cars
Ferrari
Mercedes
Luxury cars
Bentley
BMW
Helicopters

There is never only one way of categorizing a topic, in the above example we also could have taken the brands as top category instead of vehicle type. When you have written down your structure, check if it is able to adapt for future developments.

The next step is to implement the internal linking structure into your overview. Usually, if you have done a good job, you should have included “all” your keywords somehow into the hierarchic, which should make it very easy to implement logical links, for users and search engines, which contain your targeted keywords as anchor text.

You might add additional elements like tags (blue cars, 2 doors, big trunk) to even find more ways to interlink between related web pages on your website with relevancy to each other.

If you want to read more about interlinking you can find a more detailed article on using your internal linking strategies to control your link power which was featured in the iGB Affiliate Magazine.

SEO Design template

Bringing your ideas and structures into a shape which is optimized for crawlers and humans either way is the next challenge. Often designers, programmers and SEOs, as well as CEOs have very different opinions about what has to be done and what is the most important thing to do. I can only recommend that you follow basic guidelines of a clear template structure:

• Navigation machine readable (for example dhtml and css)
• Javascript only for non search relevant parts of the websites
• Good implementation of site elements (navigation, content, sitebar, advertisement)
• Headings (h1,h2,h3)
• Title tags containing the keywords you want to rank for
• Good use of meta-tags (especially canonical and description)
• Implementation of images using correct file names and alt-tags
• Avoid duplicate content issues

Of course there are a lot more elements which could be mentioned, like the robots.txt, sitemaps, the robots-meta tag, and many more. There are a lot of guides in the web which can help you, even Google’s webmaster blog is a helpful resource.

Link building

Maybe the most difficult and enduring part of your SEO strategy. There are many ways to get links pointing to your websites, some of them are not very popular in the view of Google, such like excessive link exchanges and link buying, but can be nevertheless part of your link acquiring strategy, because one thing is for sure without links it is very unlikely that you will win top rankings.
Making wrong decisions on your link building strategy can lead to hard punishments and even de-rankings from Google. If you are not sure what to do I always recommend to consult an seo expert.

As a basic guideline, you should never forget when building up links, is to be as natural as possible. If you think “hey this link or website looks very suspicious to me”, than it probably also does to Google and you do not want to be connected (via links) to this type of websites.

If you need help with any of these steps do not hesitate to consult an SEO specialist I have seen more than one website which has been dead from the beginning on, because SEO has been neglected in the development.