Pre-Marketing of a Brand New Site for Search

If you are a company who is planning to launch a brand new website for an upcoming project, or an SEO working for such company there’s a number of things you could (and should) do, while waiting for the website to be developed and launched.

Let’s say you know the development schedule and that the site is going to be launched in a few months. Instead of sitting around and waiting for the site to be launched before starting the SEO/SMM process, you should get a head start by following at least some of the following steps.

1. Register domain names and set up hosting right away.

This one is the most obvious, and most companies are indeed doing this, but it helps to mention anyway. You definitely want to come up with the main domain name, and if needed register any additional names and set those up to redirect to your main domain name. After all, the last thing you want to have to deal with is someone stealing your domain name while your site is nearing completion.

2. Launch a quick optimized splash page.

You can do this relatively quickly (1-2 days) and should really take advantage of the ability to get the site recognized while you can. One obvious reason is just to let people know that your full site is in development and will be launched soon, but another important reason is to start building domain history with search engines as early as possible.

Most people do create a splash or “holder” page, but oftentimes limit themselves to just putting up a logo and a ‘Coming Soon’ message.

Instead, try to make sure the page has few optimized items, such as:

• Title Tags
• Meta Tags
• H1 Tag
• 1-2 Paragraph of text describing the project

You should optimize all of the above with some initial keywords: usually branded keywords, as well as some of the most obvious keywords that you know you are going after. Just make sure you’re not optimizing for too many keywords, since you only have 1 page to work with. Using just 2-5 keywords is a good idea at this point.

You can also include standard imagery and/or videos for aesthetic purposes, as you are trying to make an impression on the early visitors about your upcoming project.

3. Perform preliminary keyword research.

To get started quickly, you just want to get some main keywords down. So make a list of the most obvious keywords and use some keyword suggestion tools to get more, if needed. The idea here is to get started preliminary link building and to optimize the splash page on your site quickly. You can save a full scale keyword research for a later date.

4. Start doing preliminary link building and directory submissions.

You want to start creating link history by building links to the domain name, even if the full site is not live yet. However, there are a few differences in building links for a brand new splash page vs. for a full site.

• Don’t overdo it. This is a brand new website and it only has one page. So start out by building just a few links and doing some directory submissions. You can gradually increase the number of links as you get closer to the launch date. If you build too many too fast, this may backfire.
• Don’t use a wide range of keywords for link anchor texts when building links. Even though you may have a wide range of keywords researched, and even mapped out for each page of the developing website, at this point you don’t want to start link building for keywords if they are not mentioned at all on the splash page.For example, you may plan on having a page for Local Events and will want to get found for some local keywords eventually. But at this point it does not make sense to build links using those keywords if you have no content to offer for the local events.

So just stick to building a few links for a few keywords that are mentioned on the splash page, as well as just using Brand Name/Domain Name in the anchor text.

5. Put up a quick WordPress blog and start creating and promoting content.

A splash page is one quick thing you can do in 1-2 days. But you can go even further and launch a quick WordPress blog hosted on your domain name, which is extremely easy to set up and you may just need to spend some time to design a theme for it, or just use a variety of existing themes. You can have a custom designed WordPress blog up and running in less than a week, while your full site launch may still be months away.

You can either have the blog replace the splash page – or keep the splash page and just put the link to the blog on the splash page. I would suggest the latter, if you are planning to keep the blog after your full site is launched (which is a good idea). That way you can have your full site replace the splash page and your blog URL can stay the same (for ex. domainname.com/blog)

Set up an editorial schedule and start writing some interesting blog posts. These can range from the information about your upcoming project/website, to the progress on the development of your project, to posts about your industry which may not have direct connection to your project, but are related in some way. The type of content really depends on you and your industry, but the main idea is to start getting people interested in your upcoming site.

You should also try to create some link baiting material, such as lists or resources to mix in with your regular posts and try to promote those on the Social Media circuit. Again, since you don’t have the full site yet, you may want to start slow with just a few attempted promotions.

Once you have some content up, you can also then ramp up your link building campaign with more links and a wider range of keywords.

6. Launch the full site in a Search Engine friendly way.

After the site is built, fully optimized and ready to be launched, make sure the launch process is done correctly.

• Avoid prolonged down time
• Make sure that indexed URLs from the blog (and any other possible pages you may have created) are kept intact. This should be easy to do if you had your blog set up on domain.com/blog and just replace the splash page with the full site.
• Otherwise if you have to move pages/URLs make sure you set up a 301 redirect to point the old URLs to the new ones.

You should also keep the blog and keep adding content to the blog on a regular basis, as this could be a great source of bringing in visitors, building links, and ranking higher on search engines for a wider variety of search terms.

You may also consider launching a part of your site ahead of schedule, and then add more pages/content to complete the site at a later date.

7. Start full speed link building and promotion of the site.

Now that the site is launched you can ramp up the link building and social media promotions to full speed. By now you should have done the full scale keyword research, mapped out and optimized your full site for those keywords.

So even though you want to wait for the full site to be launched to do the full promotion and link building, as you can see there is plenty of pre-marketing tactics to implement in order to build domain history and attract an audience even before your full project is ready to be revealed.