Building an optimised friendly website
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We are in the process of having a new website built and was wondering what factors do we need do we need to instruct our web company to include, at the build phase, to ensure that we can easily optimise it for SEO purposes. They have designed us a previous site that has excessive duplicate URLs and they haven’t given us access to the code so we can’t add 301 redirects etc and would like to avoid this in the future. I look forward to hearing from you
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First off in my opinion you should always have full control over your site.
First of all, depending on what's the purpose of the site, find a good CMS which will allow you to manage your site.
I'd suggest you to read the following in order to have an idea of how things should be put in place in a SEO perspective
-http://moz.com/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo
-http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition
These three resource should give you a good understanding of best practices and things to consider in order to create a search engine friendly website.
Also check out webmaster tools help to find information about more specific and technical info.
If you have any Q's let me know.
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Most modern day Content Management Systems handle this. Talk to your developer and see what system they are using to develop your site. Encourage them to go with one of the more popular ones. I have used Wordpress and Joomla in the past. Both are Optimized for SEO, and are extremely flexible in what they can do and how they look.They both have flexible backend systems which will allow you to add or change pages, or put in redirects, etc. If the CMS themselves can not do it there are usually add ons which can. Good Luck
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