Website Development & SEO
Few web developers appreciate the complex interrelationship between website development and search engine optimisation. Many will never have heard of search engine optimisation, and of those that have, quite a few will consider it a ‘dark art’ practised by people in pointy hats and flowing robes. All stages of the website development process – choice of domain name, site architecture, coding, content and web hosting – involve choices which impact directly on the ability to optimise the website to achieve high search engine rankings. There are a number of ways of ensuring that the development of a website takes due account of the sites search engine optimisation requirements:
SEO Integration
An effective method of ensuring that a website is fully SEO
compliant is to entrust its development to a firm with expertise in both
website development and search engine optimisation. The integrated SEO approach
can also be surprisingly cost effective, since search engine optimisation
is ‘built in’ to the site during the development process, rather than being
‘retro fitted’ when a site fails to perform as expected. Optimising an existing,
poorly constructed website will be both time consuming and costly, since the
site will require radical restructuring and recoding to enable SEO to be implemented effectively. The main reason that the integrated
SEO approach is not used more frequently is that there is a scarcity of firms
with the necessary expertise in both web development and SEO.
SEO Input
An alternative approach is to contact a ‘pure’ web development company to build the site, or develop it in-house, but to employ a search engine optimisation consultant to ensure that the site is constructed in a SEO compliant manner. The search engine optimisation consultant would usually meet with the developers to decide the main issues that need to resolved prior to the build – technology, structure, naming conventions etc. – and provide a detailed SEO specification to be followed to during the site’s construction. The SEO consultant would then oversee the project to advise on any search engine optimisation issues which arose during the build and ensure that the SEO specification is adhered to. Using the same search engine optimisation consultant to oversee the web development phase and then implement the search engine optimisation phase ensures continuity is often the most practical method of ensuring a website developed in-house is optimised effectively.
SEO Free
The usual scenario, when a website is commissioned, is for the contract to be awarded to a company which offers competitive rates for website development, without considering the search engine optimisation needs of the site. When the website fails to perform as expected, a specialist search engine optimisation company is called in to optimise the site, a process which very often requires rebuilding the site from scratch. Thus the initially attractive option of using an inexpensive web developer ends up being the most expensive route to developing an effective website which achieves high search engine rankings.
Web Development Choices
Businesses inevitably find it difficult to assess the relative value of superficially similar services offered by a search engine optimisation company, a web developer or a company with dual capabilities. There will always be pure web developers who can undercut the cost of website development which involves a search engine optimisation specialist, just as there will always be opportunistic search engine optimisation companies quoting extraordinarily low prices for a service with little or no merit. Web development and search engine optimisation expenditure form the major part of a business’s long-term investment in its online presence. As with all investment decisions, judgement should be based more on quality and performance than on price.
