ccomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be

New website owners and existing website owners alike consistently make a very common, yet extremely costly mistake. They find a web designer first and then an SEO second. Unfortunately, these entrepreneurs do not realize that literally every single thing that goes into building a new website will impact your SEO campaign. They commonly funnel thousands of dollars into a brand new website, only to find out that there are a lot of areas that must be rebuilt in order to have an optimum SEO campaign.

I will identify 6 major areas of concern, in hopes that even a small percentage of these website owners will come across this document at the right time, which is BEFORE they begin to develop their website.

1) Domain name registration & hosting. Make sure that when you register your website’s address that you register it for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site site has been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website, that is owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be

are a lot of areas that must be rebuilt in order to have an optimum SEO campaign.

I will identify 6 major areas of concern, in hopes that even a small percentage of these website owners will come across this document at the right time, which is BEFORE they begin to develop their website.

1) Domain name registration & hosting. Make sure that when you register your website’s address that you register it for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site site has been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website, that is owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be

t for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site site has been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website, that is owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be

important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be

ccomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be a full requirement of the job.

3) Editing the head tag. There are three areas in the head tag that you will want to be able to either edit yourself or have your SEO edit. They are the page title, the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag. Having control over these for each of your top level pages (all the pages linked to from your home page), will be critical to your websites success in the search engines. You definitely do not want these to be the same on every page (they must be unique and reflect the nature of the content on the given page). For other pages that will be created in high volumes, you will want to make sure that there is a variable string (your web designer/ programmer will understand what this is) in place for each of the three areas in question, so that they will automatically be filled with content that is the right length and reflects the content on the given page.

Again, make sure that your designer/programmer understands that this is a requirement of the job.

4) Clean, simple code. Ideally you want to define all aesthetic properties that different types of text on your site are going to have in a separate CSS file. This means that you want to avoid using as many tags as possible, especially font, size and color tags. You also want to avoid creating PHP scripts that are either two long, and contain a lot of unnecessary steps, or ones that rely heavily on javascript. It is best to avoid using javascript as much as possible.

Remember, the most important thing your site can be doing is making it easy for search engine bots to easy scroll through the code of your website