 Hello
Readers,
Have you written off Yahoo!? For now, you probably should. But don’t forget them
forever…
Back in December Yahoo! announced that it planned to buy Inktomi. It now appears
that deal will indeed occur, and go through sometime in March. Meanwhile, Yahoo!
has ceased compiling search results itself and is instead getting results through
Google. The popular SEO wisdom of the moment says to ignore Yahoo! (after all,
why bother getting listed at Yahoo! when the results are coming from Google?),
but be sure to put a note on your calendar to reevaluate Yahoo! in March. Once
Inktomi is in place, the landscape will shift again. Yahoo! plans to provide MSN
with search results. Which makes me wonder whether Yahoo! will continue to receive
results from Google, or will it use its own search engine instead? It’s a complicated
old SEO world.
If your mind is whirling after reading about Yahoo!, you’ll be pleased to read
today’s article by Andrew Gerhart. He’ll get your feet back on the ground with
some solid logic about optimization and launching a site. Should you wait to launch
a site until you’ve had a chance to optimize, or should you just go ahead with
the launch and optimize later? Read on and find out! The answer (and reasoning)
just might surprise you.
Taking Time to Optimize: Is
it Worth Delaying Your Site's Launch?
by Andrew Gerhart
If a new website project was placed before you, and it was your decision whether
or not to launch the site before it had been properly optimized for the search
engines, what would your decision be? Would you launch the site, or would you
wait? If one was to research into the pros and cons online, one would find many
sources that advocate waiting to launch a website until it has been completely
optimized. Within the current search engine landscape, this is no longer the case.
Below we will discuss when it is best to launch a site before optimizing, when
this can harm your site, what the ideal situation is, and the pros and cons for
each.
If a website has been designed and developed, and is set to be optimized either
internally or by an outside SEO firm, the best plan of action currently is to
launch the site without optimization in place. Without further explanation, many
people will disagree. Let me explain. Currently, one of the largest sources of
search engine traffic is Google, for almost every website. If you launch your
website when it has been completed but without any optimization in place, Googlebot
will most likely crawl your website and index your pages within its next database
update. If your website is included within the Google database, this means that
Googlebot will be re-crawling your web pages. Once you have your website completely
optimized and you upload your new pages, your listings within Google will update
at a much faster speed than if you had waited to launch your site. With a site
that is already launched, you can expect for the optimized pages to be picked
up in the next update. With a site that has not been optimized, you will have
to wait at least one more month. Whether your site's goal is to increase sales,
educational, branding, marketing, or any other, this is valuable time wasted.
Launching a completed site before implementing search engine optimization can
be beneficial in other search engines as well. Inktomi currently requires you
to register your web pages in their Pay-For-Inclusion (PFI) program if you would
like to be included in their database, but it is widely known that many sites
have been included for free into the database if they are patient. If a website
is launched while the optimization work is still in production, this will allow
more time for Inktomi's spider, Slurp, to find your website and increase the chances
that your website be included free of charge.
The time between a website's launch and the time it is re-launched with search
engine optimization implemented may also result in the site having a number of
external links already established at the time of re-launch. We all know how important
link popularity is, especially within today's search engine algorithms, and the
results of optimization efforts may be much higher with external links already
established.
There are certainly instances when launching your website prematurely can have
serious negative effects on your website's standings within the search engines.
If your website is not completely developed, with all content, images, and pages
in place, you should not launch the site. This can have many negative effects,
especially within the search engines and directories.
There is the chance that your website without optimization implemented will receive
horrible placement within Google and other search engines that index the site
without payment. Google or another search engine may not find enough content,
keywords, optimized Title tags, or another variable that the algorithm calls for.
You may find that your site is ranking on the 16th page of the results within
Google and AllTheWeb (two of the last standing large non-monetary search engines).
If this happens to you, don't worry! While this may not help your search engine
traffic or increases in link popularity, the frequency of search engine spidering
and database refreshes will insure that your optimization changes will be picked
up quickly and your pages will crawl from the depths of the search engine results
pages (SERPs).
If your website does not have a search engine friendly navigation structure or
linking structure, a visiting search engine spider or robot may not be able to
find and index all of the pages of your website. A few that will hinder search
engine indexing are navigations comprised of JavaScript links, Flash, enclosed
in frames, and image maps. (Note: currently Google and Fast will follow Flash
links) Is there an ideal situation when launching a website? Yes, there is an
ideal solution to this type of situation that will produce optimal results. When
the website design agency is still producing the website, the search engine optimization
firm should begin producing the Title, Meta, and ALT tags for each page of the
website. The SEO firm should send these tags to the website design agency to implement
into the site before the website is launched. While the website is still being
designed, the SEO firm should begin to seek out external links for the site. Once
the website has been launched and handed over the SEO firm for production, the
website will have optimized some of tags that the search engines are looking for,
and some external links will be established. This will hopefully result in the
site being positioned decently and the search engine robots to return to the website,
which means the SEO changes will be picked up quickly after the re-launch.
Andrew is the Director of Search Engine Optimization Operations at Top
Site Listings, a search engine optimization and online promotion company geared
towards assisting corporate-level clients and their needs. Since it was founded
in 1997, Orbidex Inc., Top Site Listings' parent organization has designed and
optimized hundreds of web sites under Andrew's direction. Since the Fall of 2001,
Andrew has served as the moderator of the Search
Engine Promotion forum within Webmasterworld.com
- a leading online community of web professionals. Andrew's articles appear regularly
on informative sites including Search Engine Guide, SEO Today, SitePoint and others.
Originally appeared at http://www.topsitelistings.com/optimization_strategies/optimize_site_launch.htm.
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