Not long ago, I did a favor for a friend and paid a visit to the U.S. corporate offices of one of the world’s top luxury brands. Despite being a global household name, the company had never sold directly to consumers. But an ambitious, lavishly produced, and expensive new website intended to change all that. With the site close to launch, together with a splashy (and pricey) ad campaign, the concept of search engine optimization suddenly blipped on the company’s radar screen.
How well did I think the site was going to do in terms of showing up in search engine results? That’s what this executive, showing off many months of hard work, wanted to know.
“Please don’t shoot the messenger,” flashed through my mind just before I broke the bad news. The site was not only not going to do well with the search engines, but it was not even going to show up in the search engines. As far as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN were concerned, this meticulously conceived, spare-no-expense production of a website wasn’t going to exist any more after its launch than it did before it was even on the drawing board.
That’s because the entire site was built in Flash.
Without a significant amount of technical expertise, both in SEO as well as in web coding and development, Flash simply doesn’t exist insofar as search engines are concerned. When a search engine spider finds and crawls a web page built in Flash, just about all it sees is the name of the page (assuming, of course, someone remembered to name the page).
When it comes to website design, or to redesigning an existing site, the time to bring in SEO expertise is sooner, not later. You wouldn’t have an architect complete blueprints for a new house, and then suddenly decide perhaps electricity or plumbing should be part of the project. The same thing applies to SEO. Sure, you can always rip down a wall or swap the places of the bedroom and the upstairs bath once they’ve been constructed—but why put yourself through the agony, expense, and hassle?
Conversely, why would a website’s capability to be found by search engines be an afterthought rather than a fundamental element of the planning process?
One of the biggest mistakes in online marketing—not just in search engine optimization—is this “build it now/worry about it later” attitude toward the searchability and findability of websites. Just as you’d need to know if you’re constructing a log cabin or an igloo before hiring an architect, you need to make search a priority that influences every single aspect of online design and development.
To avoid costly mistakes, not to mention the hassle of undoing or redoing weeks of hard work, SEO considerations should be part of any website project from the beginning. The person responsible for SEO should meet with the designer(s), developer(s), and copywriter(s) to ensure that navigation, code, text, URL structure, tags, page structure, redirects, and a host of other site elements are addressed.
None of this should indicate that SEO can’t help an already-extant website, of course. It can, and as discussed in the last truth, SEO is an integral part of the ongoing maintenance of any website that wants to be found on the Internet. But in an age when performance and achieving business goals are critical to the success of many sites, why would anyone in his or her right mind not seize the opportunity to bake “findability” into a website from the get-go?
Conducting initial keyword research will help determine what keyword queries the site must target. Doing so is not only essential to SEO, but it also will help to determine what type of site is required. This early planning will help shape the information architecture of the entire website, even down to the number of pages required to give each set of keywords their due. Because keywords must be surrounded by targeted, relevant copy, SEO is going to determine what words are on the site’s pages to start with. It will influence the design, development, and coding of the site’s pages. And as we saw in the previous illustration, SEO concerns are going to influence the technology platform on which your site is built.
The time to start worrying about SEO is always now. SEO concerns and considerations must be raised before a site is speced out, during the development, design, and build processes, as well as after launch.