SEO shouldn’t be an afterthought – it should be implemented right from the beginning. The most important part of an SEO campaign is keyword research , so you need to find out what keywords your target audience may use to search for your service or product.

Your website content should be built around the keywords you have researched. Keywords should appear in the page title, in the headings of your content and in the body of your content. It’s never a good idea to leave pages blank or have ‘Under Construction’ messages – it’s much better for a search engine to index real and original content rather than a blank page.

The structure of your site should also be search engine friendly, with well-define navigation that is easy for your users to navigate and a search engine spider to crawl. Clean and simple URLs are favoured by search engines; also use keywords within your URLs. Linking between pages on your website is always a good idea – this provides another way for search engine bots to crawl your site.

In addition to this you should upload an XML sitemap to Google – this will provide a list of all your site’s pages in XML format. Check out this article for instructions on how to set up a Google XML sitemap.

Implementing your SEO strategy during the planning stages of your website is a necessary step in today’s competitive climate.