Forum Moderators: open
My company is in the process of redesigning our corporate web site. The existing site is a piece of junk and will be scrapped entirely, so we have a clean slate to work with.
The purpose of the site is mostly informational, although there is a strong lead generation component. E-service is also planned for a future phase. We will be using Macromedia Contribute as a CMS. Our top referring SE's are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.
I've been asked to write an SEO strategy document that will, among other things, drive the copywriting for the site. I have a collection of tactics that I will mention as part of the overall strategy, but was wondering if anyone had some good lessons learned from sites they had implemented from the ground up? Anything you did that you would do differently, if you had a clean slate?
Any ideas, links, etc. would be very much appreciated.
Gem
[edited by: agerhart at 6:00 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2003]
[edit reason] edited [/edit]
1. Assess existing links: take note of who's linking to the site as it is now, especially if there are links to internal pages. That might affect the content you decide to keep or develop further. Let linkers know if URLs change.
2. Brainstorm for keywords: spend some serious time mucking about with keyword suggestion tools to find out how people are searching for your topic/products. It's not always what you expect. Give the copywriters full access to this research, don't just hand them a list of target keywords.
3. Design for accessibility: Not only is that A Good Thing in its own right, the tweaks and tidbits that make pages more useful to someone with an audible browser reader tend to make good spider food too.
4. Design for speed: faster loading pages make a better experience for users, and spiders like lean, clean code.
5. Keep content at the top: design a template that delivers the keyword rich content early in your source code.
6. Design for navigability: be sure all content can be reached by someone with javascript turned off, or who doesn't have this or that plugin. That lets spiders navigate too. Provide text-based parallels if some content is delivered via Flash or whatever.
7. Remember popup blockers: more and more people are blocking popups, so don't use popups as the only way to deliver essential content.
{edited to fix grammar error}
[edited by: buckworks at 7:00 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2003]
9) Link from content pages. Example: In the paragraph that goes over making widegts blue link to your blue widget help book.
10) Provide a well made SEOd site map.
11) Page names.
Just a few very LOW LEVEL thoughts.
Brian
Keywords Keywords Keywords before the coding starts! Map the relationships between them.
