The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

The Major Elements of Planning

As any experienced SEO consultant will tell you, you should incorporate your SEO strategy into the site planning process long before your site goes live. Your strategy should be well outlined before you make even the most basic technology choices, such as the hosting platform and your CMS. However, this is not always possible—and in fact, more often than not an SEO professional will be brought in to work on a site that already exists.

Regardless of when you start, there are a number of major components to any SEO plan that you need to address long before you research the first title tag.

Technology Choices

As we already suggested, SEO is a technical process, and as such, it impacts major technology choices. For example, a CMS can facilitate—or, possibly, undermine—your SEO strategy. Some platforms do not allow you to have titles and meta descriptions that vary from one web page to the next, create hundreds (or thousands) of pages of duplicate content, or make a 302 (temporary) redirect the default redirect. All of these things could be disastrous for your website.

This problem also exists with web servers. For example, if you use Internet Information Services (IIS), the default redirect choice is a 302 (as we will explain in Chapter 6, a 301 [permanent] redirect is essential for most redirect applications). You can configure IIS to use a 301 redirect, but this is something you need to understand how to do and build into your SEO plan up front.

Market Segmentation ...