The Siteopedia
Way: This Is How I Do It
Every professional consultant has their own
bag of tricks that helps them work their magic. Most of them
won't tell you what's in their bag because they're afraid you'll
steal their secrets and somehow replicate what they've done. I
really doubt that would happen because the blueprints are wired
to my brain, and in the end everyone works differently. Read on
to learn more about how I work to see if there's a fit between
us.
My Website Development Workflow
After 12 years of developing websites, I've found the following
process to be the most efficient and effective way to develop websites
of all sizes:
1. Discovery Phase
- Gather requirements -- First I interview the client to find out
what they
want to accomplish, both in terms of business and marketing. This
information is crucial for me to understand what your site needs
to do. The goal isn't to deliver an attractive design, it's to
deliver a site that achieves your business objectives. (A nice
design is important, though).
- Research competitors -- Over time, every industry
has developed certain
standards for design and marketing, so it's important to study
competitors
and ensure that your design ultimately fits in with those general
guidelines. I get to know your competitors so I can
out-design and out-market them.
- Plan information architecture --Before a single
pixel is painted on a screen, I develop a spreadsheet that represents
the anticipated structure of your site. Every section and page
is mapped out and named accordingly. Form should follow function,
as they say, and the form is your website architecture.
- Conduct SEO research -- Again, before any design
work is begun, the SEO plan is set in motion. In this step, I research your
target audience's
keyword phrases and modify the information architecture so that
your content is molded around keyword concepts. This makes SEO
much more effective than retrofitting existing content with SEO.
- Design wireframes -- Now that I know
what content your site will have and how the SEO will be approached,
I'm ready to start sketching out your site layout. In this step,
I create skeletal blueprints that indicate where content will be
placed on key pages. After we agree on which content will be placed
where, we can get to the fun stuff!
2. Development Phase
- Design home page and global templates -- I start the design process
by producing two or three versions of the home page design, based
on the home page wireframe. After we reach agreement on the home
page design, I then produce the global template that most other
pages on the site will share.
- Design MySQL database -- With the design locked in, I design
the MySQL database
that will control some of the site content (such as news and products),
if applicable.
- Program HTML/CSS templates -- In this step, I convert the site
design into HTML/CSS programming necessary for rendering the design
in a web browser.
- Program PHP -- If the site includes a database, I then program
the site to interface with the database with PHP programming and
the HTML.
- Embed SEO -- As I always say, SEO should be baked into the site
development process. That's the only way to ensure that SEO principles
have driven the site's content and not the other way around. This
step includes optimizing your site's title tags, meta descriptions,
page headlines, body copy and anchor text.
3. Review & Testing Phase
- Developer testing -- After the
site development is complete, I
thoroughly test all the site's functionality to make sure it all
works.
- Client testing -- When I'm done testing, I turn it over to you
for your testing.
- Tweaks & changes -- Many times there are changes to the site
for various reasons. Here I make those changes and fix any bugs that
are found.
- Site launch & monitoring -- When your team is satisfied
that the new site meets your objectives, we launch it. After launch,
I carefully monitor the site's activity to detect any issues.
My SEO Process
1. Discovery Phase
- Goals for SEO & Marketing -- To kick off
your SEO campaign, I review your online marketing goals. What are
we trying to accomplish with your
SEO? Do you want to increase your search engine rankings in general,
or do you have specific targets? Sure, everyone wants top rankings
across the board, but in reality you have to pick and choose your
SEO battles and focus relentlessly on them if you want to outrank
your competitors and turn your site into a source of renewable
traffic.
- Competitive study -- Every business has competitors, and you
can always learn what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong
and how you can beat them. It's extremely important to know what
your competitors are doing so you can devise a way to beat them.
- Benchmarking -- To understand whether the SEO
campaign is effective and what might need to be tweaked improve
results, we will establish benchmarks
of current search engine rankings and referrals. This document
will be updated
monthly to
show progress against the benchmarks before the SEO campaign was
begun.
- Technical audit -- I review all technical aspects of your site
to determine whether there are any obstacles to search engines
finding and indexing your site content. If there are problems,
I recommend fixes in my action plan.
- Keyword research -- Keyword research is crucial
to successful SEO. Here I research keywords related to your business and create
a target keyword list that is ranked by priority and an assessment
of keyword opportunity; in other words, how likely it is that your
site will rank highly for those phrases.
- Keyword assignments -- When I've found a good
number of highly searched keywords related to your site, I assign
those keywords to pages and sections on your site that I think
have the best chance of ranking highly in search engines. Anyone
can find
keywords, but only experienced
SEO consultants know how to properly use those keywords throughout
a site.
2. Action Phase
- SEO action plan -- This step
is the heart of my SEO work. In this step, I will deliver a document
that provides an explanation of the changes I propose to make to
certain types of pages. Changes will be proposed for title tags,
meta description tags, page titles, body copy and image ALT tags.
I will also make the HTML changes required to implement my SEO
recommendations.
- SEO changes -- I either implement the changes
recommended
in my plan, or work with your technical team to make the changes.
- XML sitemaps -- After changes to the architecture and optimization
have been completed, I will create and submit XML sitemap to search
engines to encourage thorough indexing of your website in search
engines.
3. Monitor & Adjust Phase
- Ongoing review -- Every
month, or even more frequently, I review your website analytics
tool to detect changes in your rankings and referrals. I also review
your Google Webmaster Tools console to look for problems and opportunities
to make your website more favorable to improved search rankings.
- Updated recommendations -- As new keywords or
ranking opportunities arise or I determine
that previous attempts at ranking are not paying off, I make adjustments
to the SEO plan. Monitoring is then resumed. It can take many months
for SEO changes to pay off, so that's why regular monitoring is
so important.
My Toolset
It's not really fair to say that a website
developer is only as good as the tools he or she uses. However,
you must have the right tools to do a professional
job. I only use the
most up-to-date, best tools of the trade. And whenever a new version
is released, I'm
always eager to upgrade. Here's what you'll find in
my bag of
tricks:
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS4- the gold standard for
HTML/CSS
development and PHP programming (IMHO, if your developers don't
use Dreamweaver, then you simply cannot trust
them!).
- Adobe Fireworks CS4- the most popular software
for website design (some people use Photoshop, but that tool is
geared toward photographers, not web designers).
- Adobe Flash CS4 - for Flash animation (I also use
SwishMax for simple
animations).
- Navicat Pro - for managing MySQL databases
(phpMyAdmin is OK, but this tool is more powerful).
- Web Link Validator - for checking for broken
links and building
sitemaps (before starting a redesign, I use this tool to find out
how many pages exist on a site; when launching new sites, I use
this tool to find broken links).
- EditPad - a handy text editor that's better
than Notepad for editing text documents, stripping formatting markes
from documents, taking notes, etc.
- Backpack - an online application for tracking
projects, to-do lists, etc.
- Zoom Search - software that builds
custom site search engines that integrate directly into a site
(yeah, you could use Google Custom Search, but this is a seamless
solution and is quite powerful).
- OpenOffice - the "un-Office"; I use it for word
processing and spreadsheets (it does the same thing as MS Office
and is 100% free).
- Mozilla Thunderbird - my email software (Outlook
is too bloated and expensive).
- NitroPDF - for creating and editing PDFs (Acrobat
is OK but Nitro is easier to use).
- DomainInspect - for finding ownership of domains
and to see if domains are available.
- Ranking Manager - for automation of search engine
ranking reports (sure, you could do this by hand, but why bother
when you can automate it?)
- Google Keyword Tool - for finding related keywords as well as
keyword volume for SEO research.
- Google Webmaster Tools - for extra insight and reporting on your
website and how Google perceives it (also see Yahoo! SiteExplorer for
Yahoo).
- Google Analytics - for website activity reports
- DropSend - for transmitting large files to
and from clients.
- eFax - for sending and receiving faxes.
- Skype - my phone service; no handset necessary and hands-free
phone calls
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