I recently read a blog by Jill Whalen where she wrote about ‘website designers/developers keep SEO’s in business’. Having worked with many different types of site platforms for different clients I can understand Jill’s reasoning, although I do not necessarily believe all website designers and developers do not think about or even know what SEO is.

A lot of the old site platforms never took into consideration SEO or any other type of online marketing, as when they were created they were not necessarily top of the agenda or even briefed into the website developers at the point of creation. As the internet has progressed over the years a lot more focus has been put on online marketing including SEO and PPC to help drive traffic and generate sales through the website, meaning that the site platforms are having to evolve.

Now, I believe the best way for website developers to work is alongside an SEO agency or somebody with extensive knowledge of SEO within the organisation. This would give the website developer all the knowledge that they would require to make an SEO friendly site platform from bottom up.

I have listed 10 things that website developers have to think about when they are creating their platforms in order to make them more SEO friendly.

• Site structure
• Internal linking
• Search engine accessibility
• Avoid use of dynamic search query filters to display product listings
• Editable Meta Data
• HTML navigation
• Ability to add HTML content
• Automated XML sitemaps
• Use of H tags
• Limit use of JS
• Use external style sheets to lower the code to content ratio

There are many more different aspects that a website developer needs to think of when developing your site platform or creating enhancements to the original ones.

If you agree or disagree with any of the points I believe that website developers need to think of then please let me know. As I have already stated there are a lot more points that you need to think about when developing a site platform for SEO and these are just a few. I look forward to hearing your comments.