Monday, June 14, 2010

Professional website redesign for improved search engine performance and enquiry levels.

Starting the business journey - professional website redesign to improve search engine performance & enquiry levels.

For many businesses, their website has not delivered the business results promised by web agencies, who focus on design or development. Whilst we can't promise to save your online business, we can promise to improve it!

As a professional web agency with a focus online marketing, time and time again, companies come to us with a website that has been built, looks amazing but simply doesn't deliver business results. A complete redesign of a website requires time and budget, but here you can get some insight into the various steps (a little free professional check list) that E-creation goes through to build a successful website addressing SEO issues & enquiry performance from ground level up.

Whilst numerous technical elements make a site successful on an SEO level, the heart of good enquiry performance consists of:

• clear definition of who your potential clients are
• high ranking, diverse online visibility to potential clients
• engaging visiual & navigation experience in website
• content that addresses the questions asked

Take stock, understand the lay of the land and then plan your journey

The first stage of any website migration or redesign is to implement Google Analytics in the existing website to establish a marker of current performance and provide insight into visitor sources / behaviour. The same code will then be used to measure subsequent website performance improvements.

There are many ‘tricks’ both during and after design / development that are key to search engine performance.

Creating a branded Twitter page during development

This enables E-creation to start ‘seeding’ by Tweeting about the design / development process, making small descrete comments on specific pages, animated elements and key content milestones.

Using Blogger early in design / development to build content momentum

Blogger outperforms other CMS applications, due to its relationship with Google (which is likely to account for 70% to 80% of your search engine traffic). Content can be created during the rebuild process and measured to refine the redesign which in progress.

For E-creation, a typical website redevelopment would consist of:

Consultancy & scoping phase

  • Detailed documentation & scoping agreement
  • Setup of Google Analytics, FTP access to current site and application of reporting code
  • Creation of feedback document to research existing customers understandings
  • Keyword research, consultancy & key phrase definition
  • Creation of website structure and page by page key phrase definition
  • Writing of an example page of best practice as a template for subsequent pages
  • SEO copywriting training / consultancy / revisions to draft content
This initial consultancy and scoping would typically take 2 weeks to complete.

Design phase

  • Brand analysis, design briefing & research
  • Research into stock library images
  • Creation of three design options
  • Revisions to the selected design direction before art working individual pages
  • Art working of individual content pages (based on 10 page layout types)
  • Design for branded Twitter page, creation of account and implementation of design
The design phase of a project would typically take 4 to 6 weeks to complete.

Coding phase

  • Creation of CSS, page framework and navigation structure
  • Creation of Blogger account for news / blog pages, application of design framework & integration into site
  • Coding content pages
  • Tuning page content / code (application of alt-tags to images, meta-tags, word cloud refinement & page links)
  • Art working of individual content pages (based on 10 page layout types)
  • Creation of back-links tracking account and basic seeding to start back-link strategy
The development process again typically takes 4 to 6 weeks to complete but depends very much on the number of pages required by the specific website.


A you might imagine, this forms the basis of any website redesign that is focused on search engine performance and getting business from the web.