While thinking about SEO and Web Design ahead of time… and after you have purchased a domain the next thing you have to do is to decide the best look and feel of your website. While it's true that your site needs to be active and that it needs to be SEO friendly, if your site does not look professional and look as though you have put some time and money into your website, you are going to lose almost all credibility with your potential clients or customers from an aesthetic point of view.

You need to decide if you are going to have a content management system (CMS), and if so what kind. If you are building your site as a storefront to an online store where people can come and purchase a product or service from you, you need to look at the back end and see how well it will keep track of things for you. Some of the simple things you need to think about and keep track of are:

• What product/service did people click on?
• How many people got to the shopping cart and then left with out purchasing?
• How many people are actually buying verses just looking?

You also will need to look and see how editable it is. The more editing you can do, the better. The reason for this is when you are doing your SEO you will need to edit many different variables; for instance alt tags, header tags, and many other types of things.

There are many different systems out there such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress which will offer you many features which look very enticing. Right now we really like the WordPress system because it's fairly easy to work with and has many SEO friendly pluggins. You need to make sure that they are going to serve you in your efforts. Also make sure that you try not to use any cookie cutter versions of different options without making modifications or it could hurt your placement with your SEO Efforts. Designing a website with SEO in mind from the get go will ultimately save you time and money down the road, while helping you to achieve better rankings sooner. The sooner you can rank for your specific key words, the better exposure you can exponentially have.