When Should I Start Working on SEO For My Site?

People often ask me, "When should I start working on SEO for my site?" My answer is - right at the beginning, when you are planning your site design, content and navigation structure. Or, if you already have an existing web site up, then the next time for serious work on your SEO improvements is when you do a site redesign.

Optimising a Mambo site for search engines involves more than just throwing a few keywords and META descriptions in and hoping for the best. The site design and structure are crucial parts of any search engine placement strategy.

To achieve high visibility on the Net is a challenge. In the huge online mall that is the internet, you have to do something to stand out in the crowd. With the Net, that crowd is millions of pages.

This brings me to another point - while you may want high rankings or good search engine placement for your web site, SEO is more fine-grained than this. What you need to look at is optimising your pages. A web site is not a book - people do not come along and open the cover then read through your content in a structured manner, chapter by chapter, they can land on any page and leave from any page. Many site visitors never see a frontpage.

Information architecture plays a key role in SEO and in making your site more usable by human visitors. Mambo's content is delivered through its menu structure. In Mambo, the menu is not merely a navigational tool, it is the key architecture for delivery of your content. All content within Mambo is controlled by the menus which is why initial planning is so important.

Many people install Mambo and set about finding a nice template without giving sufficient consideration to the content of their site, the target market for their site, and how usability, accessibility, and SEO will be achieved. Is your site content organised logically? If someone was to land on a static page or somewhere in the middle of your site, what will they see? Will they have clear, understandable navigation that will encourage them to visit other pages? Does every page make sense in its own context, without the need for anyone to visit any other page? If the answers to these are "no" then you didn't do enough planning before you started.

Whether your Mambo site is for business, a church group, school, or hobby, you need to define what your site is about and who it is targeted at. What segment of the online community do you want to attract to your site? Businesses know about marketing and branding, but for a visible online presence every web site owner needs to understand marketing. Do some marketing research before you build your site. Define your market and identify your competitors (in search engine marketing, your competitors are every site that appears within the first three pages of search engine results). The more goal-oriented you are with your site, the more focused you are on what your site is intended to achieve for you, the easier it is to optimise it for search engines and get good results.

Tip:
Do some brainstorming before you start planning. A mindmap tool I find useful is FreeMind.