Creating a New Website? Re-Designing an Existing Website? Talk to Your SEO Pro First!!!  One More thing...

... if you decide you want to emulate an "industry leader's" website, make sure that "leader" is really using a web design and a Search Engine Optimization Strategy that is going to boost your search positioning potential.

For instance, let's say you're a mid-size, natural dog food manufacturer and you want to compete with the well-known companies. (By the way, this is a fictional example and any similarities to real companies are purely accidental.) You decide you should have a website that is like "theirs" (since they are so successful) and you get your website designer to look at the big company sites to get an idea of a direction you need to take with your website design. Sound familiar?

Your website designer designs a site that has a gorgeous flash banner that takes up half of the web page showing beautiful, healthy dogs romping through a fantasy meadow, pulling dog sleds, swimming in a mountain lake, or saving a baby falling from a skyscraper - you get the picture(s); all the information about your dog food and company is within aesthetically-appealing graphics; there is no real informational/optimized content; the SEO is practically non-existent. You love it! 

Give it two months (give or take) and you'll find that your site can't be found because it's buried so deeply in the Google cellar that it's seems like you don't even exist. What happened?! You did everything the "industry-leaders" did for their sites - you would think that you should be found at least in the top 20 search positions. You would think. But that's not the way it works.

Without getting too technical and caught up in all the details, you didn't have a chance to get top search positions. Your new website was never going to get you better search positions because the "industry leader's" website you emulated didn't have a good website design for successful online exposure.  Chances are, the "industry leader" didn't even have that great of a search presence for the keyword searches your audience would use - they don't have to - they have brand equity.

When you have a well-established brand, your website can still work for you because the audience knows your name and will search for specific information using your brand. So, if you cannot cash in on a well-known name, you may want to think about cashing in on a solid website design that uses up-to-date search engine optimization. 

Just sayin'...