Your Website from the Ground Up in 10 Steps (2)

Step 3 - System Back End
If you plan on having a large scale website that will grow and change constantly then you may want to consider a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla. If you decide to go this route, you want to ensure that whichever CMS you choose is search engine friendly and offer items such as unique title tags, custom URL's, and full control over content, heading tags, image alt tags, etc.

Starting a website using a non-friendly CMS is like buying a car without an engine. Sure it may look great, but it will not get you anywhere.

Step 4 - Site Structure & Navigation
This is really one of the most fundamental aspects of your site creation. If the structure of your site does not work well, then your site may be doomed from the very beginning.

Take a look back at your keyword research and brainstorm all the areas of your site that you may want to develop content for. In some cases you may find valuable keywords that would fit perfectly into a few pages of content for your site. If the phrase and the content would be a good match for the theme of your site, go ahead and note them as pages to create. Get a list, or flowchart, of all the content you plan on adding and sort those pages into relevant categories.
Be sure your site files are saved in a way that makes sense - this includes both the file name, and the complete path to the file. Save files, including similar content in a relevant subdirectory, with simple file names representing each. Let us take an example of an informational site dedicated to a specific geographic location. If you have a series of pages dedicated to recreation, you may save them as:
/recreation/parks.html
/recreation/trails.html
/recreation/beaches.html

Keeping your URL structure clean and tidy can not only help with search engine rankings, but it will give a good visual impression to the site visitor as well. Often, using each of these categories as main points for your primary site navigation may make the most sense.

Also be sure to keep your site relatively flat, with as few layers as possible. Do not make the search engines follow a dozen links to get to the deepest levels of your site. Unless the site is literally tens of thousands of pages, there is no need to click more than 2 or 3 links to get to any deep content. The shorter the path to an internal page, the more credit by the search engines.

Step 5 - Navigation
When developing the end site, you also want to make sure that your site navigation is search engine friendly - this is critical if you ever want free organic listings.

If possible, use a text based form of navigation. You can use CSS to style the text links to fit into your graphical design. Text links are the best method, but image based navigation and even some forms of drop down menus are also search engine friendly.

If you choose to use image based navigation be sure to include image alt text relevant to the link to give something for Google to associate with the linked page. If you absolutely must use Flash, or any form of navigation not friendly for search engine spiders, be sure to supplement this with text based links on another location of the page.

To be continued..