Soft-launch Your New Web Site

In order to gain search engine visibility when you’re ready to launch your Web site, you must ’submit’ it to the major search engines as soon as possible. Their crawlers are pretty busy spidering established Web sites, usually they don’t bother with orphans¹. A fair search engine placement depends among other things on frequent deep crawls.

Immediately delete the default page placed on your domain’s root directory, since ‘under construction’ is a useless term to get indexed for. Write an essay summarizing the overall theme of your Web site. You need at least one page telling visitors and search engine crawlers what your site is all about. It helps to release the major category pages too, this provides a good indication about the structure, and allows guessing the future size of your new Web site. Announce the launch, put in a ‘date’ META tag on every page (and make sure you can launch punctual).

Ask a friend for a not that prominent link to your domain from a page known by the search engines. Then check your spelling, grammar and all links, and submit the root index page to all search engines. If you’ve started with a fair amount of unique content, you can submit your site to DMOZ² too. Don’t expect any traffic at this time. All you want for now is letting the search engines know that there is a new URL.

As soon as you’ve uploaded a few subsidiary pages, buy a fair amount of traffic and track all visits. From reading your server statictics you will learn a lot about your navigation scheme. Tweak it as necessary, then buy the next chunk of traffic and repeat the experiment until a fair amount of users is landing on pages located in the deepest hierarchy level. If you can’t bring in excellent SEO skills, hire a search engine optimizer to get you started with a search engine friendly Web site. If you’re challenged on Web design, hire a Web designer to make your site nice looking and attractive, but not too heavy (each page must load within 10-15 seconds on a dial-up). Using a CMS, the Web design is done once by customizing templates, you don’t need the help of a Web designer with each new page.