Should You Do SEO Keyword Analysis Before Developing Your Site Map?

Recently, I spoke with a prospect who’s ready to revamp her business website. She engaged a company to conduct a SEO keyword analysis and make recommendations for her new site. With the report in hand, she’s now working with a designer to develop a site map and design for her new site. We connected to talk about copy for her website and how to optimize it for search engines.

Which raised the question: Is it better to do SEO keyword analysis before you develop your site map? Or after?

The answer depends on where you fall on the SEO continuum. The continuum for website search optimization ranges from hyper-aggressive SEO to no SEO at all. For some businesses (and SEO companies), SEO is the highest priority. Figure out your SEO strategy first, they say, and then build your site around it.

Those of us who land in the middle of the continuum, take a more balanced approach. When I work with clients, I recommend creating a website and developing a site map that meets your business and marketing objectives first. Figure out the purpose of your site, your target market and what your target market needs to know; then create a site to meet these objectives.

Only once you’ve taken these steps should you start playing with SEO. Where you can insert keywords logically and deploy SEO methods without disrupting the original purpose of the site, then do so. But if optimizing your site means derailing your overriding objectives, then you need to scale back your SEO tactics.

In other words, my philosophy is to write for people first and search engines second. It’s an approach supported by Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

What do you think? Where do you fall on the SEO continuum?