Competition in any online category is severe, and a company that decides it needs a website has two routes: commission a development company, or recruit technical staff. The cost difference between them is large, and it shows in the product. Expensive builds tend to be better builds; cheap ones tend to be limited in how far they can grow and weak on security. Whatever the route, the site has to be designed for search from the beginning — retrofit SEO afterwards and functions that should simply work will not. So what should be settled before the work starts?
1. The site’s structure
Know the architecture before designing it. A well-planned layout is not only better looking, it is indexed faster. The structure should be flat and tree-shaped, so that a visitor or a crawler reaches any page within three steps.
2. Static pages where possible
Serve HTML rather than generating every page on request. Static pages are crawled faster than dynamic ones, and on Baidu that difference is measurable in how quickly new content appears in the index.
3. A sitemap
Build one and submit it to the search engines once the site is live. It is the difference between a crawler finding your pages and a crawler finding some of them.
4. Internal links
Plan them rather than letting them happen. A sensible internal linking pattern lets a crawler move through the site freely and connects related content pages to each other, which is how a site earns depth rather than just width in the index.
5. The template
Where the build runs on a ready-made source, the template decides a great deal about the structure. Choose one designed for optimisation: a search-friendly frame that matches the content will do more for the site than any amount of keyword work applied afterwards.
6. The markup
There is a lot to say about code — the title, description and keyword tags, the heading tags, the div and CSS structure — but the item most often left empty is the image. A search engine cannot see a picture, so the alt attribute is the only thing it can read. Put the keyword and a description of what the image shows into it. Alt text matched to the term you are targeting is one of the cheaper wins available.
7. The supplier
Prices track technology and approach, and development companies publish many different source packages for clients to choose from. A ready-made package saves money, but extensibility is limited, and where secondary development is offered the security is not guaranteed. Better to pay a properly registered company for a build that is done correctly than to take the lowest number — the site will outlast the saving.
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