There are lots of Youtube videos out there on the world wide web in which Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web Spam Team and general SEO guru, offers informed advice and insight on all things SEO. Part torture, part earth-shatteringly informative, they range from tutorials on indexing and visibility to domain age, meta tags… you name it. There’s one in which Cutts talks specifically about the canonical link element – essentially, standardising your website URLs. Now while most of what Cutts has to say might appeal largely to ‘aficionados’ there is one inspired line in the canonical link element video that should resonate with anyone who’s ever been in the position of having a website made and then marketing it.

He quotes US SEO ninja Jill Whalen who says, “developers keep SEOs in business.”

What Cutts is getting at is that there are best practices that can be adopted to ensure that your site and its structure is optimised upstream – not just when it comes to link elements but in any aspect of your site design and build – tags, structure, anchor text. Get it right in the web design and development stage and you won’t have to pick over an under-performing site, snagging and correcting it after the event to optimise performance.

The canonical link element is a good example. There is a multitude of ways that URLs can be expressed, including using www at the beginning, ending in dot html or dot asp, or forward slashes, for example. All of these different beginnings and endings in effect offer a different page. This leads to both duplicate content issues and also difficulties in identifying the real and proper URL. Rather than having your backlinks all going to one page, many websites through a lack of consistency at the web design stage spread them out. Not ideal.

It’s knowledge and know-how like this that can make all the difference to your website’s performance and ultimately the success (or not) of your business on line. Getting it right first time is an important competitive advantage. The solution is fortunately extremely simple.

If you want to be assured that your web design investment is in safe hands then be sure to use an experienced, proven web design partner.