When faced with the challenge of developing a new website it is tempting to get the new website’s development and design done and think about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) later.  By taking SEO in consideration during the initial stages of the development process you can save yourself a lot of time (and money).

The planning process is one of the most important stages in website development.  Pre-determine what type of pages you want on the website and what goals you would like to achieve through each web page.  Once that is done, create a keyword strategy for the website.  After finalising the keyword strategy, allocate keywords to each page before writing the content.  That being said, don’t force keywords into the copy.  Write for your human visitors first and once you are done, go back to see where relevant keywords can be inserted without breaking the flow of the copy.  Remember to include clear calls-to-action in your copy to ensure your visitors know what you want them to do next.

Your website’s structure plays an important role in usability.  By including a site map you will not only help human users to easily find what they are looking for but it will also indicate to search engines how they should index your website.  As a marketing tool a website should show return on investment hence the goal is to ensure that the website has a high conversion rate.  By measuring how visitors interact and engage with the website one can achieve the best possible conversion rate through continuous testing and tweaking.

Increasingly people are searching for information on the go and not surprisingly the number of users accessing the Internet via their mobile handsets has increased. For many consumers, their mobile phone is their primary Internet access point. Taking all of the above into consideration, it makes it vitally important to have a website that can be viewed easily on a mobile phone.

One of the biggest limitations of using the Internet on a mobile phone is the size of the screen. This has implications for websites with small font and lots of images as they don’t display well when viewed via the mobile web.  There are other things to keep in mind when creating a mobile website, for example:

• Don’t use Flash
• Mobile users are looking for text content, if you have to include images make sure their file size is as small as
• Keep it simple, especially when it comes to navigation

Lastly, make your contact details even more visible on your mobile website.  Chances are if someone visits your website via their mobile they are trying to find out where you are located or how to contact you.  Make sure to have your physical address and phone number easily accessible.

Mobile internet users are looking for information on the go, make sure your website provides them with exactly that.  If your website or blog is built in Wordpress, try the Wordpress Mobi Plugin to optimise it for the mobile web.

Further reading and tutorials:  Optimize Your Website For The iPhone & Other Mobile Devices

Even if your marketing budget is small, there is no excuse for not measuring activity and engagement on your website.  There are many free tools available that allow one to track and measure how visitors interact and engage with your website.  Think of an analytics package as a business intelligence tool.  If you know what your visitors are doing on your website, how they found it and which key-phrases they use to find it, you can utilise that data to make strategic marketing decisions.  To get you started, below are a few points you can pay attention to:

Bounce rate

This indicates whether the page the visitor landed on meets their expectations or not.  A high bounce rate means visitors did not find what they were looking for immediately and they clicked away from the website.  Reduce your bounce rate by looking at which keywords visitors are using on search engines to find a specific page on your website.  Scrutinise the content of that specific page to determine if you could add more information to make it more relevant to your most popular search queries.

Exit points

An exit point is where a visitor left the website.  If there is a page with a high exit rate it could indicate that the information on the page is not sufficient, or that there are insufficient calls to action.

Goals and conversion

One of the main advantages of online media is that Return on Investment (ROI) can be more accurately measured than with traditional media.  Goals that have been allocated to your website can include a number of things like downloading a brochure or completing a sign-up process.  Once a visitor converts, they become either a potential lead or client, hence one can say the percentage of conversions on a website is an indicator of its success.

Finally, optimise your website by means of testing, tweaking and measuring.  The use of an analytics package on your website will give you an idea of users’ behaviour on your website and what they want to derive from it.  Successful websites analyse the data from their analytics package on an ongoing basis and tweak the website to improve users’ browsing experience.