If you’re about to undertake a website rewrite or redesign, don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to copywriting and search engine optimization. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The various departments within your company need to work together, coexist, cooperate (whatever you want to call it) by developing a content strategy for your site. If your copywriter is constructing online content without input from others, you are empowering him or her with the creative freedom to write whatever. But that isn’t the best strategy.

First, help out your writer. Marketers need to realize that writing is a process with checklists, so strategies are welcomed. After all, that was the whole point of developing essay outlines when you wrote term papers in high school or college. Good writers take suggestions from everyone to form beautifully crafted masterpieces of interwoven information.

So when companies engage in copywriting without SEO guidelines, only to go back months later to input SEO elements, they balk at streamlining the process for efficiency. Granted, optimizing a site is a never-ending process: Fresh content is best, link building occurs and targeting a new set of keywords may become necessary down the road. But owning up to a “writing first, SEO second” mentality as being counterproductive and creating double work could save your company time and money.

Start with or immediately involve your SEO team, and gather the necessary analytics to form a strategy. Even consult your website designers to understand how the creative elements will impact writing and site structure (SEO writing doesn’t have to lack creativity, either, which is why online writing is an art and a science). Form a site map, although it may change as your site development proceeds, so writers can organize and understand what goes where. Strategize. Organize. Optimize.

From a writer’s perspective, SEO can guide the copy (but shouldn’t act as a curb, which limits copy from being outside the box of creativity). Web writers construct creative, yet tactical, Google-friendly copy around keywords, striving for the ideal keyword density, placement, etc. within the main body areas (balancing usability and “searchability” is a completely different blog post). Writers will use these same SEO elements to compose effective metadata, alt tags, anchor text and headers. Without doing this, you’re hindering your site’s chances of being found and, thus, converting sales, which is the whole idea behind online marketing.

Based on this, having a list of targeted keywords at the start of any campaign is ideal; otherwise, a writer has to revisit copy after it has gone live in order to strategically implement keywords. Implementing SEO second can completely change the copy’s structure; this requires time, and time is money. By retroactively targeting keywords, you are essentially pumping your site full of keywords just to have them there, so your site can read awkwardly. Trust me. I’ve seen it. I can easily pinpoint sites that have been written for the obvious intention of overloading keywords. SEO from the outset, however, can (you guessed it) guide the copy to flow better.

I hope you see how this could be understood as reinventing the wheel. If a redesign is in your company’s plan or budget for 2010, set aside time to analyze your site and its end objectives. Form an overall content strategy that should incorporate the appropriate SEO components to give your writer a guide.