Never Leave Search Engine Optimisation Till the Very End
We actually turned work away today … not because we’re too busy to handle any more (which we just about are) but because it was too late to do what the new client wanted us to do.
This website owner had employed someone else … a friend I think she said … to build an online store for them and now that the store was complete they wanted us to do some SEO work for them. One quick look at the site was enough to tell us that there was going to be very little in the way of search engine optimisation that we could do for the site.
The site was built using a shopping cart script that we’re quite familiar with and it is possible to make sites built with this script do really well in the search engines but ….
To make that happen the search engine optimisation people have to be there from the start. They need to have some say in the overall design of the site and not be left out till the very end because by then it’s just way too late. With this particular script there are too many important variables that become non-variable once the site is ready to go live and there’s very little search engine optimisation anyone can do from that point on.
And that’s why we turned this work away. It would have been a waste of our time and the clients money to have pretended otherwise. I did point out to the client though that she would find plenty of people who would claim that they can do things to improve the search engine rankings for the site but they were all snake oil salesmen.
So remember, when you’re having a new site built be sure to include the search engine optimisation people right from the start because once the design work is finished it’s way too late to start thinking about achieving a good position in any of the major search engines.