There is this widespread perception among many business owners that SEO starts after the website is live and the business is up and running.

This can’t be any further from the truth.

As a matter of fact, SEO planning begins even before the first designs for a website are submitted by the developer. Good websites are built on the foundations of SEO; it’s not the other way around.

Period.

Imagine a scenario…

You have a year-old website, but it’s not converting. You reach out to an expert SEO agency for help. After a thorough tech audit, and an intensive review of the conversion funnel, the agency comes back with some harsh recommendations:

“You need to redesign your site architecture,” or

“Sadly, you’ll need to migrate your website altogether.”

The hassle that could bring.

And let’s not even get into “losing the business” side of things here.

You don’t want this to happen.

So, if you’re planning to set up a website for your business, whichever web developer you may hire for the job, make sure you discuss with them the following:

Site Structure

Site structure refers to the casual flow of navigation on your website.

An effective site structure allows search engine crawlers and website visitors to easily locate and access information on your website. For that, you must keep the structure of your site as flat as possible.

As a rule of thumb, all the pages on your website should be no deeper than “4 clicks” from your website’s homepage.

HTTP or HTTPS

There are basically two types of websites: 1) websites with “http” in their address, and 2) websites with “https” in their address.

When working on your website with a web developer, your goal should be to have them build a “https” website for you.

Why?

That’s because websites with “https” are secured. Furthermore, these websites are also more favored by search engines on search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to plain http websites.

Site Speed

The importance of having a fast uploading website can’t be overstated.

Often, web developers under the pressure to deliver code on time, neglect areas that affect page speed.

Remind and communicate to them the need to have a website optimized for speed and performance.

Integration of Canonical Tags

There might be a page on your website that will have to be made accessible through multiple URLs.

Or, you might have different pages that will need to be designed with similar content (for instance, in case of separate desktop and mobile web pages).

This can confuse the search engines.

They would not know which URL is authoritative and may end up indexing all the URLs. As a result, your webpages will end up competing with each other unnecessarily.

To avoid this from happening, your web developer would integrate canonical tags in the pages to tell the crawlers which version of the URL or webpage they should use for serving your customers.

Conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, it’s crucial that you actively take part in the design process of your business website and discuss everything in detail with your web developer, especially the SEO aspect.

If you’re looking for a reliable web development service, get in touch with us; we’d be more than happy to assist you on your web development project.