If you want your website to have a good ranking on the search engine results pages, the time to start planning for it is long before you launch your site. Here are a few points to consider during the development process to make search engine optimization (SEO) easier for you.

The first thing you should take into consideration is the kind of audience you’re looking for. Are you strictly seeking potential customers for your products or services? Do you want to build a loyal following of people that consult with you frequently? How much discussion do you want to foster; do you want to build a community? These kinds of audience interactions and audience members will all likely run different kinds of searches through the search engines. Do your research and figure out which terms attract which people.

Another important part of your initial research will be narrowing down the list of keywords you have. After you define your audience and come up with the kinds of search terms they’ll likely use, your list will probably still be rather long. In order to get the most effect out of your efforts, you’ll want to focus on just a handful of keywords. Select them carefully! Do you want to engage in cut-throat competition for the most popular terms, or do you want to try and capture a niche dedicated to more specialized keywords?

Once you have your keywords and your audience in mind, it’s time to start building your site. When you begin this process, give some careful thought to the software that you use. Not all web design programs are created equal! In order to optimize efficiently, you’ll want a program that pumps out very clean HTML. You should also work with a program that makes it easy for you to tweak your raw code; you’ll want to insert keywords into your tags and headers.

Multimedia content need not be a headache from an SEO standpoint. You will often hear that animation and images are your enemy if you want to optimize your website. This is not entirely true; the heart of the matter is that multimedia files cannot make the same kind of SEO contribution that plain text (and HTML code) can. That does not mean you should turn your back on them, though! They can make your site much more interesting for visitors, and real visitors have their own powerful positive effect on your ranking.

When you take your website live and start publishing content, don’t restrict your vision. Remember that content goes everywhere on the modern Internet. When people go online, they may well spend the majority of their time on social networking sites. You should be there to meet them. You need not build a full-on social media marketing campaign. Just make sure that people on these sites can find their way to the content on yours.

It can be tempting, once you have your website running smoothly, to diversify and start producing content on whatever takes your fancy. Resist this temptation! In order to get good a good search engine ranking, laser-like focus is your friend. Keeping your entire site concentrated on one subject is a powerful way to increase its relevance. If you feel like sharing unrelated content, remember that there’s nothing stopping you from starting up a separate site.

If you lay the proper groundwork early on, you’ll find that SEO is really not difficult. When you keep it in mind from day one, it becomes an integral (and powerful!) part of building and maintaining your site!