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We were talking the other day in staff meeting about our development projects and SEO. Because we do both web development and SEO, many times it takes several months from the time we get a project to the time when we're ready to begin SEO. My question is this:
What are your thoughts about building the "welcome" or "holding" pages w/ 250 +/- word of "good content" and begin some basic hand submissions coming to at least that one page. Maybe we could build a simple contact form as well. If we use "real" content w/ "real" keywords, etc...would that at least help us get a jumpstart on the spidering process?
OR
Will that hurt us because some of these spiders will come to the site and see it's only 1-3 pages?
We all sit back and check our web stats to see what spiders are visiting our sites and how often, etc...I'd just like to begin the process of being indexed prior to having the entire site live and then...WHAMMMM...one day the spider will come and the site's there and it can begin to index the live site immediately.
I began thinking this way when you see how much more quickly pages get indexed and ranked when we optimize existing sites rather than brand new ones. I'm just wondering if the extra few months of being "live" and submitted will help once the final content is up.
What are your thoughts about building the "welcome" or "holding" pages w/ 250 +/- word of "good content" and begin some basic hand submissions coming to at least that one page. Maybe we could build a simple contact form as well. If we use "real" content w/ "real" keywords, etc...would that at least help us get a jumpstart on the spidering process?
It might. I don't see how it would hurt to have a page detailing what you expect to be doing when the site is fully functional -- there would be a lot of keyword opportunities in such content, and you'd also be serving any stray visitors who somehow find the site. A contact form geared toward "Would you like to be notified when our site is launched?" is another good, friendly customer service thing to do.
However ... submitting to the crawler-based search engines is all but useless these days. They find sites by crawling the web, not thru sites submitted to them (which are said to be 95% spam submissions). And you don't want to submit an unfinished web site to any human-reviewed directories like ODP, Skaffe.com, JoeAnt, etc. They won't accept a site unless it's fully functional, so skip the submission part.
I'd just like to begin the process of being indexed prior to having the entire site live and then...WHAMMMM...one day the spider will come and the site's there and it can begin to index the live site immediately.
My wife and I have just launched a P/T home business. The home page for this business has said nothing but "stay tuned" for the past 5-6 months. Somehow, Google found and indexed that page. It was never submitted, it's not linked from any other sites ... nothing. I have no clue how it got into Google, but that's another thread some other time -- the point is that your Welcome/holding page may be indexed without having to submit, and once it is, then you just have to wait for the crawlers to revisit after the fully functional site launches.
For my next site I'll try to start with 50-100 pages to see if all of them will go up immediately, so they can already start doing work in that first month.
SN
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