SEO WEB DEVELOPMENT

Seo web development is fundamentally about doing web development with search engine optimisation considered at every stage of the development cycle.

Right from the very beginning SEO is integrated into the information architecture of the site to ensure that the content / navigation and structure of the content are all in sync with your targeted key phrases.  Pure SEO development i.e. where the aim is not as concerned with an end user experience as it is with the Robots experience is something that has its uses however rarely is capable of lasting in the longer term.  What you are looking to do is achieve a mix between user and robot experience in order to ensure that you get an optimal mix.  

SEO Information Architecture

The fundamentals of good SEO revolve around having a good information architecture upon which you can build.  Its not just a case of putting together a site map that looks right, you must investigate  every aspect in detail and ensure that the structures reinforce the relevant taxonomies and ontological aspects of the project.  Naturally we understand context when writing or speaking and we assume that search engines do as well, this is reinforced by lots of talk  by some of the more vocal SEO industry of search engines using techniques such as latent semantic indexing without them truly understanding how it applies.  Do not assume google et al with understand what "wind" is (I meant it in terms of a winding road).  You have to exam the IA in finite detail to ensure that its enforcing the correct classification and hierarchies that you need to deliver your message to search engines.

SEO Content Development

By taking SEO into consideration from the beginning you can provide structures and extensive guidelines based on your information architecture for your content developers to follow and while its rare that you can get an exact match a good copywriter can get you very close to your desired aims.  You should review all the content developed with and SEO's eye to ensure that they are delivering back what you need for your aims.

SEO Design

By providing an in-depth information architecture to your designer you have given yourself a much better change of getting back designs that reinforce your SEO rather than fight against them.  Review the designs before starting to code to see if any simple improvements could be made to improve SEO, NEVER EVER assume that the designer has understood your instructions so check every single screen for errors / opportunities, its much to easy for someone creative to interpret something from a non creative as being completely different as they will always have a broader interpretation than someone who's more rigid in their thinking.

SEO Web Development / Technologies

In order to deliver high quality SEO web development you need to ensure that your developers / themers have all gotten at least a set of fixed guidelines covering areas like the semantic make up of pages and load order of code.  Ideally they should all go through training to ensure that its embedded in there working practices, this should not however be left to chance and your testers should have guides on what to look out for as potential SEO issues.  

Its imperative that you take any technical advantage that you can gain by introducing technologies such as RSS / RDF(e.g. FOAF) however you have to be careful and if your publishing RSS for example you have to verify that what's included in the RSS feed is what you want.  You have to dig into every single little corner of your website and ensure that its all working together in a harmonious fashion in regard to SEO.  Its all too easy these days to add hundreds of widgets and ajax bits to a site without looking at the overall impact on SEO.  If your looking at adding anything then you should always know the SEO impact.

Deploying an SEO'd Site

Always block robots from the initial launch so that you have time to re-examine the site in the live environment, it should only take a hour or so to verify everything, then just switch your robots.txt to allow full access.
Special attention needs to be paid to every aspect of your technical stack so you should not just toss the site onto a server without checking the server configuration down to manually validating the .htaccess and robots.txt.  Check things like making sure that a page that says 404 is actually returning a 404 in the response header.