Search Engines and the final site.

[Michael@PT]

I am coming to the end of the site design process for our cosmetics company and i am beginning to look into the SEO sideof things and am finding it tricky as hell!!!

Do you recommend completely finishing the site and then looking at making amendments to the site to gain higher search engine rankings?

Or do you recommend me not finishing the site start looking at making it search engine friendly before completion.

I dont want to finish the site onyto find that to get a half decent ranking i have to change half the content!!

As well does anyone half any simple tips to making sites a little more SE friendly or know of any sites which give good solid advice?

Any help on the matter would be grately appreciated.

[jont]

Hi Michael,

Mike (Olderscot) is probably the main authority on SEO on here so worth checking out his postings.

Search engines do seem to like new content being added on a regularish basis - so if the main theme and design is completed and most of the products added then I would submit and then steadily add further products or brochure content over a period of time.

Making it search engine friendly is again part of the on-going process in tweaking descriptions for more focussed keywords. Check out your stats package to see what search terms are being used to find your site and also what your competitors are doing if they are being ranked above you.

[pinbrook]

Or do you recommend me not finishing the site start looking at making it search engine friendly before completion.

part of SEO is your page titles and product descriptions, therefore you should be looking to ensure these are SEOed as you develop the site.

Do some keyword research to find out what people search on, identify the keywords which are important for your products and then ensure these words are present in your titles and descriptions.

Think "Search Engine" ....

Q how will a search engine know that your site sells "widgets"?

A because it will find the keyword "widget" in your page title and product description

[Dek]

Both!!!!!!

You should do the research first as Jo suggests.

A big mistake of SEO is to do it once and leave it alone, the exact opposite of this is to make major changes all the time.

start with a good grounding of what keyphrases you want to target and gradually add your content and tweak rather than wholesale change.

If you are changing page names "xxxxx.html" to "yyyy.html" then you are not doing yourself any favours as the old pages will still be in the engine index and be giving 404 errors.

Do some of your own research into SEO in general and then apply the logic to Actinic.

The best advice I can give about a search engine engine spider is KISS(keep it simple stupid). The spiders like to follow easy readable, logic with relevant html.

There are two types of index or crawls, one is to actually index the site in the engine database and the other is trawl all the links or a traverse crawl as is sometimes known.

Having a steady improvement on your site allows the links to be stable and this stability will help with your placings.

Dont submit ALL your site in one hit, optimise each page carefully and do some for each different search engine and submit your individual pages carefully and only do one page per day.