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Post by Eric Brantner

Most businesses make the crucial error of hurriedly launching a poorly constructed site for the sake of having something online. It’s only after the site starts performing poorly that they begin to realize something needs to be changed. This is usually when they start searching the internet for solutions, and they learn about SEO.

What happens from here is they usually try to tweak their existing site into one that’s more SEO friendly. When they fail to see any considerable spike in traffic or search engine rankings, they say that SEO is bull****, writing off the entire industry as a scam.

The reality is simple tweaks to a site not built for SEO just doesn’t cut it. Instead, they should have followed these 7 tips for optimizing their site before it ever went live.
1. Competitor Analysis- Regardless of what business you’re in, you need to know what your competition is up to. How can you expect to outperform them if you don’t know what they’re doing? The most obvious first step to competitor analysis is to see what keywords they’re targeting. But it goes beyond that. You also need to understand their linking strategies, their off-site SEO, and other steps they’ve taken to achieve top rankings.

2.Keyword Research- Keyword research is the bread and butter of SEO. Think of it as the foundation for your entire site. Without good keyword research, your site will never make the splash in the search rankings that you want. One mistake companies often make is to try to target keywords that are far too broad to rank well for. For instance, if you sell windows, you don’t want to target just windows. Instead, you should focus on specific phrases like  hurricane proof windows or energy efficient replacement windows.These are the keywords that will bring you highly targeted traffic.

3. Content Optimization- Contrary to what you might have read, SEO friendly content doesn’ t have to be keyword-stuffed, unreadable passages. Unfortunately, thats exactly what tends to pass as SEO copywriting these days. In my mind, content is properly optimized when your readers don’t even notice the keywords peppered throughout the copy. Aside from the use of keywords, the rest of your copy should adhere to the traditional rules of copywriting. This includes a strong call to action, short passages of text, and benefits-driven copy.

4.SEO Friendly Design- This goes back to the original point of this post. One reason optimizing after your site has gone live doesn’t work is that it wasn’t designed to be SEO friendly in the first place. Your page needs to be designed so that it’s easy for the search spiders to crawl through it. Although the search engine’s ability to crawl flash websites has improved, it’s still far more effective to employ CSS on your website. Additionally, your pages need to be designed to load quickly so that your bounce rate won’t go through the roof.

5. Conversion Driven- Is there anything worse than visiting a website that’s impossible to navigate and that includes almost no contact information? If your website isn’t conversion driven, it doesn’t matter how high you rank in the search engines because you’ll never get any sales. You need to lead your customers down the path to taking the action you desire. Make your call to action easy to see. It should never take more than one or 2 clicks for a website visitor to become a customer.

6. Interlinking- Interlinking is important for both SEO and navigational purposes. In addition to your main menu bar, you should also interlink to other pages on your website throughout the body of your content. These links shouldn’ be in there just for the sake of adding links. Any time you include a link, it should make sense to helping the reader move forward through your site. Additionally, you should make your anchor text keyword rich. This helps both the readers and the search engines get a better understanding of what the target page is about.

7. Usability Review- Before launching your site, the last thing you should do is review its usability. Sometimes, it’s easy to get so caught up in building your site for the search engines that you overlook the human user experience. Review your site to make sure it’s easy to navigate and that the content makes sense. Give your website visitors a simple to follow web layout, and they’ll be likelier to stay on your page longer.

What other tips would you add to this list? Tell me what SEO strategy you follow before launching a new website.