Why You Should Incorporate SEO Into Your Building Plans

I've been trying to think of a very common-sense way to explain why it's so much better to build a site with Search Engine Optimization in mind, rather than going back and trying to SEO an existing site.

The best analogy I could come up with is to liken building a site to building a house. I actually think the analogy is rather apt. First, think about the pages of a Web site like the rooms in a house. Rooms are separate and distinct, but they all fall under the same overall structure, the house. Similarly, the pages of a Web site are distinct from the site in general, but still exist within it.

Think of a page's content like a room's furniture. If you remove all the furniture and decoration from a room and replace it with other furniture, the room will be in the same place and be the same room, it'll just look different. It's the same with a Web page. Take all the page's content out and replace it, it's still the same page, it'll have the same url and exist in the same place, it'll just look different.

Where is this going? Say you decide the living room should be on the eastern end of the house instead of the western end. You can just switch the furniture up, which might help, but if the rooms are different sizes, this probably won't work. Then you have to actually move walls around to make it happen. This is expensive and time-consuming. If only you'd known you would want it like this when you were building the house, it would've been no more expensive or time consuming the build the room where you wanted it than building it where it is now.

The location of a room in a house corresponds with the location of a page in a Web site and its url. Changing either after the fact can be expensive and time-consuming. Putting your page in the right place, with the right url, would have been super-easy when you were building the site.

What does this have to do with SEO? A lot of SEO has to do with urls and site structure, where pages are located. A good SEO will know where your pages should go and what their urls should be for maximum SEO benefit. You want that knowledge and expertise when you're building the site, when good decisions are as easy to implement as bad ones, rather than having to go back later and move walls.

That's what we do at Triad Web Design. We build your pages with SEO in mind, with solid site architecture and urls that incorporate relevant keywords. Hopefully this helps to explain why that matters!