I talked last week about some of the dilemmas facing agencies when smaller clients come in the door and — with limited budgets — expect us to both design a site for them and make that same site easily found through organic search such as Google or Yahoo. Despite the additional costs associated with priming a site for search, though, we have increasingly come to the conclusion that to not design with SEO in mind is shortsighted.

In a typical scenario, SEO is often applied to a site post-creation by a third party SEO vendor who gets a hold of a marketing manager or webmaster and convinces them of the value that SEO offers. However, retroactively making a site SEO friendly is like adding an after market air conditioner to a new car. The resulting addon usually costs more money and doesn’t work as well as one installed in the factory. Designing for SEO involves more than applying invisible code to the back end of a web site. It impacts all the significant messaging elements — copy, video, images and links. Designing with SEO in mind from the outset then, offers the opportunity to marry message with searchability right up front.

For this reason, we’ve developed suite of services which we’re offering to our new and existing web clients. Called SEO Preflight ® these services are all designed to ensure that your site will attract traffic initially and — with ongoing maintenance by one of our partner SEO professionals — keep pulling visitors to your site.

SEO Preflight services will vary somewhat, according to the needs of every customer, but minimally include the following services:

• Research and develop likely search strings using
  client input and keyword research/discovery tools
• Write Keyword embedded copy for all meta tags
• Integrate keywords into all copy for visible portions of web site
• Pay careful attention to tagging all images with relevant text tags
• Make sure all sites have Privacy Statements and Company Information
  pages.
• Create and submit a site map to all relevant search engines
• Ensure that site creation is consistent with Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Install analytics monitoring tools to site

Choosing SEO Preflight ® for your new site will give our clients the comfort of knowing that, not only will their new or redesigned site be attention getting… it will also get attention on the web.