A few months back I had built this site: www.rivervalleydevelopment.com – It was the first 100% responsive HTML5 site I had built to date. I recently was contracted to do some SEO work on the site, at which point I realized I had never written an article about the initial build. So I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and do them both now. So here we go…
RVD is a real estate development in Newaygo, MI, slightly outside of Grand Rapids, and has a huge apartment complex, many industrial, commercial and office spaces. It was very cool to be a part of something like this. When I had initially met with the clients, they where looking for something that would look good both on desk tops, aka normal computers, as well as mobile devices, so obviously going with a responsive website is a must.
The client was also very interested in making sure that the site ranked well. The site overall is meant to generate leads, inbound marketing, as well as showing off where they are currently at with the project, and what is still available.
As with my standard responsive website designs of late, I went with a combination of HTML5, CSS, PHP and Javascript. Overall the javascript is simple about serving up the pictures in fancybox and validation for the contact form. The HTML5 and the CSS are the majority of the code along with the styling. I am using media queries to make the site fully responsive. The PHP is just a bunch of random and simple includes for centralizing things such as the footer, the header and so on. As well as some PHP in the contact form. Really straight forward build.
The SEO so far has just boiled down to doing the appropriate keyword research and using an LSI Keyword Strategy to insure we are getting the most bang for our buck, and targeting the appropriate terms by search volume for what we need to target. The only tough thing here is that overall the client does not want a ton of static content on the site, which is one easy way of targeting for a ton of search strings, so here I had to be smart and do a lot of the targeting strictly with meta-data and a small amount of static text and external linking. She ranks well now, but with what I just did it will rank even better. Visit www.rivervalleydevelopment.com today and see for yourself.