Monday February 06 , 2012


Contact: queries@seo-consulting.co.za

Website Development

 

Website development includes both the graphic and structural design and development of a website.

The following aspects are important when planning and creating a website:

 

  • The website strategy must be used as a benchmark throughout the development process.  It is important to plan and formulate the strategy in detail before starting development, and to check the development of the website against the strategy.
  • Structurally, the website must be planned according to search engine friendly standards, allowing for website growth and 100% visitor usability.
  • Structurally and graphically the website must adhere to website usability standards. This will ensure that the visitor’s interaction with the website is as positive and profitable as possible.
  • Graphically, the website must be designed around the company brand in order to assist in brand building and online awareness.

 

SEO Consulting follows a 4-step process when creating a website:

 

Step 1: Planning

The planning process includes in-depth content and page planning. You are the expert on your business. In what can be a lengthy process, the planning session involves a thoroughly comprehensive workshop with your marketing and communication department. The purpose of the session will be to use your expertise on your business to identify the pages of your website and the content (keywords and headings) for each of these pages.
SEO Consulting will use the information from the planning session to do keyword research and analysis in order to plan search engine optimised content for each page. The research will include understanding what the current top 5 ranked websites competing with the chosen keywords are doing.

 

Step 2: Development

The development process includes creating the visual and structural aspects of the website, for example the artwork and navigational structures.
Please note the following: SEO Consulting can create you website in Joomla. This means that a content management system is available to you that will allow you to update your website in-house if you choose to take this task on.
The final step in the development process will be to write and implement the search engine optimised content for the website. The content production includes creating unique and optimised meta information (keywords and description) for each page.
During this step the website will continuously be reviewed against good SEO and good website usability standards.

 

Step 3: Implementation of Analytical Code

Analytical code are little snippets of JavaScript that enable web analytical software to track activity on the web page. These code snippets have to be implemented on every page of the website to ensure sufficient activity tracking.
SEO Consulting makes use of Google Analytics (a free application) or Hitlens (a monthly subscription service) analytical software. For campaign and layout testing SEO Consulting uses click tracking software that produces heat maps and other graphical results (a monthly subscription service).

 

Step 4: Moving the website into production and managing the first website exposure tasks

The final process of the website will be to take the website live (after client signs off on the demo website).
SEO Consulting will manage the following tasks to start the website exposure tasks:
  1. Creating Google and Yahoo webmaster accounts
  2. Creating and uploading various sitemaps in 3 different formats for different search engines
  3. Submitting the website to major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)
  4. Submitting the website to 100+ smaller search engines
  5. Submitting the website to free, high ranking directories
  6. Starting a link building campaign
  7. Starting a social book-marking campaign

Client Involvement

SEO Consulting will have regular meetings during the steps outlined above to ensure the website content and design stay in line with the company’s vision and the website strategy.