Temporary Landing Page for SEO Jumpstart
September 12, 2009 by Marc
Filed under Client Websites, SEO, Search Engines, Websites
It will often take a month or two or more after you get your domain name before you will have your final website. And it is not unusual for another month our two after that before your site is indexed. But as I have written before you can use that time to get your domain well indexed in search engines and even test some of your content.
Rather than let your hosting company leave up its standard “under construction” or “coming soon” default page or an image of your logo, put up a simple WordPress blog with just a post or two of your basic content and a little about your business and contact info. This will shorten the time until it is indexed and greatly improve your site’s search recognition.
TECH 5 temp landing page
Recently (today) I took some time and did just this for a friend and his new telecommunications company, TECH 5.
His logo was done and he asked if I could replace the standard Network Solutions “coming soon” page with his new logo. I went a little further, I installed WordPress, uploaded the Atahualpa theme and a few plugins (cforms, All-in-One SEO and Google XML Sitemaps). Then added the logo and some content (that they already had put together for the new business) and voila … a temporary landing page that announces the new business with some major SEO mojo.
Admittedly it is not as pretty as the finished website will be, but it puts all the needed info out there right now in an easy to modify format, SEO optimized and it will make sure that the final website, when it is done, will enjoy as strong as possible search results from its first day on the domain.
If you have any questions feel free to send an email or leave a comment.
Heh, this one is a no-brainer. I’ve done it with a few sites. I buy the domain(s), take the time to write one article for each of my intended “categories” and get it posted. They sit there for a few months while the site is being fully developed, and by the time the site launches, we’re already on a regular crawl schedule from most of the major search engines.
Gary, appreciate the confirmation and you are absolutely correct, this is not “rocket science”. It is just one of the important details that can make a great productive website. Unfortunately most website owners and even website developers don’t think to do it, or ask to have it done. As you point out it is well worth the little time and/or money.
I have a couple of sites I am about to start using wordpress (one of them is my own). I am a newbie with WP so my question may sound silly but… I was wondering if you can do this with static sites using WP and if so how I would go about that? The websites I am building are not blogs and wont have blogs in them. One thing I am not sure about is what url do I give the temporary landing page?
One thing I am worried about is that from talking to my host it appears that if I want anything temporary I have to convert the url to live and build the new site in live mode as well. I don’t know if this is a host specific issue in that some hosts allow you to have a site in a testing area and still be able to have the url live so a temporary landing page can be published… and some don’t allow this or not.
Any help would be gratefully received as I have spent ages trying to find info on how to approach temporary pages in an SEO friendly manner and this post is by far the most helpful.
Hi Lisa,
The way I work around a hosting limitation similar to what you describe is to develop the temp and permanent sites in different directories. For example one I am doing now has a “start” and a “final” directory I created in the html root. The start directory has a WP install. When it was ready, I just moved the WP index.php file from yourdomain.com/start to the root directory following the instructions from the Settings>General page in the WP Admin panel. This then became the temp landing page for yourdomain/com. And then I am still able to work on what will be the final site from the yourdomain.com/final directory. When the final site is ready to go live I just rename the index.php file from the temp site and move the needed files from the final site into the root directory.
I am not sure this is the same as how you would do it on your particular host but if it is not or if you have questions feel free to email me. There is usually way to do it.