I’m a huge believer in getting to know my client’s processes, business goals and background. I think it gives me more scope to deliver a higher quality, and more effective website.

And when I say more effective I mean all round; search engine wise, lead generation wise, usability wise and so on.

When I build a website I consider various things before I’ve even started to build it, all encompassed in the broad headings I’ve given above.

But what about the build? How best to tackle that? I’m sure that every designer or developer has their own traits and techniques that make them unique, but there are certain things that everyone can do to aid their website SEO from the ground up.

Here are some things worth considering:

• DOCTYPE – pick the most suitable one for you and declare it properly.
• HTML markup for layout purposes – make this clear and concise so that even if a reader has no CSS enabled, they will still see logical flow of each page. Remember; this is how spiders see your website so let it flow naturally. The Web Developer add on for Firefox is great for testing this out.
• Semantic markup – this can be as simple as letting your heading tags flow properly (h1 is the most important and h6 the least) and using tags such as <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>. It’s clearer to everyone as it separates style from content.
• Optimise your images – this covers all aspects of optimisation; alt / title attributes and considering load times per image.
• Natural navigation – a standard user interface menu is just a list of links. Mark your navigation up like this so that the spiders see your hierachy.
• Properly optimised copy and content – we know how important this is so make sure that your keywords are properly researched and then implemented.
• Internal links – keep the flow of the site natural to a reader by pointing them in the right direction with quality internal links.
• Validation – make sure your website validates to W3C standards for the DOCTYPE you’ve declared. Certain things like jQuery can stop your site validating at times, this is a trade off you need to think about – functionality over validity?

Of course this list is purely something I think about when I’m marking up my sites. There are a hundred other things to consider too; sitemaps, robots.txt, backlinks and so on; these are all things that designers, developers, SEMs and other web professionals readily implement as a matter of course.

If you’re on your way to building your first website then I hope you find this a useful read. And, if you’re a seasoned web guru, how do you go through the markup process with SEO in mind? I’d love to hear from you!