Search engine optimization for your website, these days, is not an afterthought. It is, as you may have imagined, an integral part of your website's structure and build, it determines the type of website you have in place and it comes down to how you are going to market it the moment it goes live.


If you are after a promotional website with the bulk of your marketing efforts focused offline using traditional means of publicity then a FLASH website will work miracles. FLASH technology is time-intensive to produce in term of coding and it is difficult to update. Search engines are completely blind to it so a website that's coded in FLASH is something they see only as an outline, its rich content may as well not exist, but that is not a great consideration if your offline marketing channels are good enough.


Promotional websites coded in FLASH are usually the preserve of rock bands, movie stars, artists and large PR agencies which already have a traditional offline publicity strategy in place or already benefit from some name brand recognition. Rock band websites and those of actors, actresses and stars usually have their name as the URL making them easy to find.


If, online publicity is important to you, which is usually the case if you are starting out a business which sells a service or a product, then you need a site that is either coded in HTML or a dynamic, database driven website in php.


There are pros and cons to each choice which are not governed just by the cost. HTML websites are usually less expensive than a database driven dynamic website but the latter does allow you the ability to take control of every aspect of it, add and delete content as required and generally carry out updates yourself in a dynamic way without incurring any more costs.


HTML sites are still updateable by yourself if you're willing to mess about with Dreamweaver or another HTML website building programme. The thing is that you will, at that stage, have to be aware of what constitutes good search engine optimization website building practice.


Beyond understanding the value of meta tags and optimized page structure within a website creating websites in HTML also requires a good understanding of internal link practice, link indexing and link tabulation. These are elements which are not hard to grasp but they are time-consuming to implement, and a dynamic website does it automatically for you.


The point is that search engine optimization does not begin the moment after your website is up and running but rather it is an integral part of the website building process. If you are not sure what work is being done on your site, always make sure you ask the web design company that's building it for you.

 

 

Case study: from Search Engine Optimisation Zero to Google Hero - check out how it was done in just four weeks

Zero to Hero integrated SEO approach (pdf)