4 Technical SEO Areas to Consider to Avoid Future Website Redesign or Migration

October 4, 2017 | By Ilfusion Team

Many business owners today don’t realize how much planning goes into building a website. SEO is often a technicality that’s considered an afterthought to be considered when the website is already live. The reality is that, SEO should ideally be included as early as the planning phase of web design and development if you want to strategically position your website at the top ranks in SERPs.

When SEO isn’t carefully planned out, your site’s organic traffic may plummet at an alarming level, often prompting web developers to migrate the site to a more SEO-friendly platform or redesign the site altogether. Both of these options are inconvenient and costly, but avoidable.

Here we’ll cover the technical areas in SEO that should be addressed before developing and launching your website to avoid future rebuilding or migration.

1. Site Structure

When creating the structure or wireframe for your website, it’s important to include SEO in the mix. Decide on what pages and subpages you want to create to avoid duplicate pages. Determine target keywords for each page as well.

Planning the target keywords you want on each page is much easier to do in the beginning. Later down the road, it’s more difficult to do so when the pages are already indexed and natural links are already developed.

2. Canonical Version of URLs

Specifying the canonical URL or the preferred version of a web page is another important SEO factor that’s often overlooked. When duplicate content can be accessed through multiple URLs, search engines may have a hard time crawling your site, thus hurting your SEO.

Each page or subpage on your website should have a unique URL, even if you decide on putting the same content in a different category. Having a clear strategy on what pages you need for your site and how each URL is structured is important to avoid having your pages unnecessarily competing with one another.

3. Site Speed

Site speed is now considered a key ranking signal in search engines. This means that if your website is slow, a large portion of your site visitors will abandon your site which will lessen your site traffic. Page load speeds for your website can be improved early on if the website is developed with this already in mind.

When site speed is considered, you can anticipate the need to use CDN for static files, to use a web hosting platform that has a fast server response time, to cache your site, and to decide on what plugins to use.

4. Languages and Locations

Determining the language and location of your target audience can largely affect how you develop your site and how you strategize your SEO. If you have a website with multiple languages and targeted on multiple regions, localized keyword research is a must because the strength of each keyword may vary per location.

As your website becomes more technical when developing country-specific content in multiple languages, you would need to pay closer attention to each of your web page’s markup and tags. Using correctly tagged ‘hreflang’ attributions will ensure that each of your content is matched to the right country.

Technical SEO is very critical when building strong, successful websites, therefore it’s important to think of SEO even before developing your website. If you want to know more about SEO, or for Ilfusion to help you with your marketing and web development efforts, give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email [email protected].