When you’re building a website for your online company, it’s important to have your SEO priorities in order from the beginning. So often, Internet marketers wait until after their site is designed and launched to think about SEO tactics, which leads to headaches that could have been avoided if they had started the process earlier in the game.

Whether you’re creating a brand new site or redesigning and re-launching an existing one, it’s important to keep search engines in mind from the start so you don’t end up with more costly changes once your site is up and running.

Getting an SEO expert involved early in the process can help you get the best search results for a new website and help you avoid a significant drop in traffic when a redesigned site is re-launched.

An SEO expert can help you make sure that your site is not only search engine friendly, but also assist you in researching and creating the best possible keywords and keyword phrases to attract your ideal clients and customers. Your SEO expert can then work with your web designer to integrate your keywords and phrases into the design itself, as well as serve as an additional set of eyes to watch for possible design flaws or inadvertent barriers to search engine traffic results.

Developing your SEO strategy early on in the design process will allow you to create an effective advertising campaign as well as get a jump on generating the right amount, and right type, of content for your pages to drive the most relevant traffic to your site.

Perhaps the most important aspect of developing an effective site is your navigation structure. Together your web designer and your SEO expert can develop a plan that will benefit your visitors as well as improve your search engine rankings at the same time. Win-win!

Although simultaneously hiring both a web designer and an SEO expert to create your new site may initially stretch your pocketbook a bit, getting a head start on your marketing tactics will not only give you a greater chance of having a successful site from the get-go, in the long run you’ll save (and make!) more money.

Picture this. You’re jumping online to check your favorite website for some information on a specific product or service. You know exactly what you’re looking for and where to find it. You type in the URL and when the page loads you move your cursor to … oh, let’s say, those fuzzy pink bunny slippers you’ve been wanting. Before you can click on the image of the adorable footwear, a popup fills your screen. You click the X to close the new window and continue your journey toward the fuzzy bunnies.

But then another popup arises … and another … and another. You end up clicking five different “close this window” boxes before you ever get the chance to check out the slippers. Irritating right? So, why would you EVER do that to your own clients? Sure, if someone were looking for your specific, unique product they might stick around and tolerate the many extra clicks to get to what they’re looking for, but in most cases, after the second extra click, your potential client would be moving on to another site where it wasn’t so cumbersome to get to what they wanted.

When you’re the owner of a commercial website, it’s great to be able to gain additional profit from incorporating ads either as popup windows or interstitials, but it’s really vital to keep your priorities in line. Sure, ads are important and, of course, the point of your Internet business is to make money, but what about your actual content? Your users are visiting your site to gain access to your products and services, or information about the two. And, if they’re like most web surfers, they’re in a hurry. The fact is, an extra ten or even five seconds feels like an eternity in this instant gratification era of ours where we want what we want right now, and where in most cases, we can get it.

Creating extra clicks/steps for your users or making them sit through a 30-second advertisement for each page they visit is not only frustrating, it gives the impression that you’re not nearly as concerned with imparting your wisdom and services to your clients as you are with making a few extra pennies from each person who happens upon your site.

Put yourself in your users’ pink fuzzy bunny slippers. Most web visitors expect an ad or two from the sites they visit, but if they’re bombarded with ad after ad and have to jump through umpteen loops to get to the content they’re looking for, they’re going to move on. Take advantage of the additional income from advertising, but not your clients who are dropping by to see what you’ve got going on. Respect their time and find a balance between the ads and content on your website that works for you and your clients.