I’ve seen it too many times to count- and it’s always painful.
Someone comes to me after they’ve launched a new website. They’re so proud. They love the “modern” look. They know it’s going to transform their business.
Unfortunately Google can’t read the site- let alone understand what it’s about- so there’s no chance it will be served-up in the SERPs. That’s why I’ve written this SEO checklist for a new website (download here).
This is designed to be a simple list for you to give to your web designer or developer to make sure the site they build for you will set you up for success.
Yes- there are both design and development SEO requirements for a website.
When it comes to SEO, designers should be concerned with understanding the goal of the website (lead gen, ecom, etc) and making the call-to-action clear. Designers should also create the website with the understanding that we’re going to need words on the page. It used to be that SEOs wouldn’t care how a website looks (perhaps that’s why this website looks so bad) but design has an important part to play when it comes to SEO.
When the developers take the design and implement it, the SEO is concerned with “how” they are deciding to do it: How are you rendering the page content? How are you making the website responsive? How are you going to create the URLs?
While SEO is never done once a website has been launched, a website built considering SEO best-practices can accelerate what you hope to gain from your website. This is not only because it makes it easy for the search engine spiders to understand what your website is about, but because the SEO can jump right into your campaign rather than have to clean up someone else’s mistakes.
In case you missed it above, download the new website SEO checklist here.
What do you think? Did I overlook anything in my checklist? Disagree with what I consider a “requirement” vs a “suggestion”? Leave your thoughts in the comments, below.