Building an optimised friendly website
-
We are in the process of having a new website built and was wondering what factors do we need do we need to instruct our web company to include, at the build phase, to ensure that we can easily optimise it for SEO purposes. They have designed us a previous site that has excessive duplicate URLs and they haven’t given us access to the code so we can’t add 301 redirects etc and would like to avoid this in the future. I look forward to hearing from you
-
First off in my opinion you should always have full control over your site.
First of all, depending on what's the purpose of the site, find a good CMS which will allow you to manage your site.
I'd suggest you to read the following in order to have an idea of how things should be put in place in a SEO perspective
-http://moz.com/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo
-http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition
These three resource should give you a good understanding of best practices and things to consider in order to create a search engine friendly website.
Also check out webmaster tools help to find information about more specific and technical info.
If you have any Q's let me know.
-
Most modern day Content Management Systems handle this. Talk to your developer and see what system they are using to develop your site. Encourage them to go with one of the more popular ones. I have used Wordpress and Joomla in the past. Both are Optimized for SEO, and are extremely flexible in what they can do and how they look.They both have flexible backend systems which will allow you to add or change pages, or put in redirects, etc. If the CMS themselves can not do it there are usually add ons which can. Good Luck
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best structure for a news website including main menu nav
Just looking for thoughts and opinions on the best way to set up the main nav on a news website that covers a specific professional services sector. There are news items, archived news, blog, events, but also main menu links to the numerous news categories that go to a page listing the news articles under that category (as created in Wordpress when publishing the article). I'm thinking that having these off the main nav is diluting the juice to the more important pages including the events and the news page? Just thinking about how to rearrange and consolidate. Any thoughts on how people would structure something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | sam_legmark0 -
Will Google penalise me for duplicating my own website on a new domain?
Hi guys, Currently, we are using Magento Enterprise to run two separate ecommerce websites, for arguments sake lets say these two websites are ElectronicsX.com and electronicsY.co.uk. ElectronicsX.com isn't doing too well, it has little traffic, makes next to nothing each month and is just a waste of resources. ElectronicsY.co.uk on the other hand is getting 30,000 unique visits every month and is over exceeding every month in terms of revenue in sales. At the moment, the only traffic we get from Europe tends to be the odd "word of mouth" customer and English customers who have emigrated to Europe but still like to use English companies. We can't rank on Google FR or ES or anything like that because the website we have "electronicsY" is on a .co.uk TLD (a GeoTLD). So what we want to do is take ALL the content from electronicsY.co.uk and place it on electronicsX.com so that we can start targeting Europe and ranking in the serps internationally. What sort of effect will that have in terms of penalisation from Google? Or because the websites are on the same C block, would it have any effect at all? Thanks guys Tom
On-Page Optimization | | tomhall900 -
Are flip books - pdf readers on websites SEO friendly?
I have a client with bar, most of their content is menus that are displayed in a flip book format. Is this content indexed by search engines, and if so, are they of any value for ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | SteveK640 -
Website redesign and it's impact on ranking
Hey Everyone, I have had a website in place for over 7 years and I am now at the point where I need to implement a redesign in order to sell our product more effectively. -URL's will stay the same
On-Page Optimization | | Justin45
-Content will change but be very similar page-to-page
-Title & Meta tags will remain the same I'm planning on taking the site from a non-backend site to a wordpress site so the navigation will change. Does anyone foresee that this change will have any dramatic effect on site ranking? Thank You!0 -
Can Other Websites You Own Affect Your Rankings?
Let's say you own three websites. One is low quality and Google frowns upon it, another is moderate and a third has stellar unique content. Would Google penalize the third website because you own the first website? On a related note - If you were banned from Google AdWords, would registering a site in your name potentially harm your rankings?
On-Page Optimization | | DerekP0 -
Optimise duplicate products or canonical link
We exist in a niche market with a good % of products that sell well at specific times of the year. Lets say for example a red cup can be sold as a christmas red cup and a valentine red cup or just a red cup. Would we be best to optimize each specific product specifically for those seasons/events on different pages or keep google pointed to just one page using a canonical link.
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Is an Overflow SEO friendly
Is an "overflow" (scrollbar) seo and Google friendly? I only ask because it hides part of the visible text.
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0 -
Too many On-Page Links on a WP based Website
Hi, I've already browsed through various of the Q&As on the "too many On-Page links" issue, but I would really need some advice concerning a WP Site with a dropdown navigation. As outlined in the on-page report, every site has about 180 outgoing links, which pretty much is the number of site featured in the navigation. Even though the 100 link limit is somewhat outdated I'm still worried about the distribution of linkjuice from the starting page and how Google perceives the importance of the various pages. Would it make sense to adapt the structure of the navigation, so that the starting page only links to the 5 category pages and the category pages only link to the detail pages they contain? The site has good rankings for several pages and I assume that Google can tell that the large number of links is caused by the navigation. But with every page having appr. 180 links it may be difficult for Google to tell, which of those pages are the most important regarding internal link structure... Looking foward to your opinion and insights! Cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | adwordize0