Post 4 of our ongoing case study - Project Tee Compressed
In our last post, we discussed kicking off the design process, some logo ideas and coming up with a draft sitemap. While our design team is busy being creative, our web development team has a task list of their own to start. We’re going to illustrate how it’s important to get some forward momentum by doing a quick "under construction" page and plugging in some basic SEO can get your new domain indexed by the search engines weeks or months before your launch.
If you are doing a redesign of an existing site, then putting up an "under construction" page isn’t appropriate. You will simply develop the new site in the background and then just switch over to the new site when ready. Your visitors will continue to see the old site until the redesign is launched. But if you are building a site for the very first time where a domain name had no existing site, then it’s a good idea to put up a new public "under construction" page while you develop the site in the background.
This helps in a few areas: First - it let’s people know that there is a new business coming in case they stumble upon your website for some reason. Much like any retail business would put up a coming soon banner, you should also let passers-by know that you are opening up shop soon. People interested in your product or service may want to bookmark your site for future reference. Another option to consider is to put up a simple newsletter signup form as your homepage to begin capturing email addresses for your mailing list. This puts customers on your mailing list to be notified when the site is ready and your store is open.
The second major reason to put up an "under construction" page is to start the SEO process. It takes search engines a while to work their way around the internet and find your new domain, so the earlier you get site content up there for them the better. It can take Google as long as 6 months to index a new site for the first time. They do this on purpose to keep their search engine index from getting overwhelmed by quick build-overnight spam sites. Putting up a very basic "under construction" page with some text and images lets the search engines know about your site and gives them a headstart on ranking your site.
At a minimum, you should provide a quick text write-up of your new site, what it’s about, what products you are going to be selling and maybe some images. You should also cover the basics of search engine optimization techniques:
- Give your images ALT and/or TITLE tags with your most prominent keywords
- Include your TITLE, KEYWORDS, and DESCRIPTION META tags in the page header.
- Use as much text as possible that includes your prominent keywords.
The other thing you can do to give your site a major jumpstart on the search engines, is to Blog about your site or business and get it cross-linked on sites such as Digg, Reddit and Sphinn. These aren’t fool-proof ways to get indexed but they help get the ball rolling on your organic rankings.
For our new site at TeeCompressed.com, we put up a static screen shot image of our new site design with an "under construction" graphic - (at the time of this post, you can see it at www.teecompressed.com). We optimized all our images using ALT and TITLE tags for our favorite keywords and put in the appropriate META tags. You can view our homepage source code if you want to see what we used. This new "under construction" page has now been up for about a month and we are already seeing some activity on the major search engines. We are also blogging about our new site (obviously, you are reading about it now).
To track keyword performance and measure other SEO analytics, we use a great tool called Web CEO. I’ve pulled the most recent report of our keyword rankings on the major search engines for TeeCompressed.com. The results aren’t spectacular, but considering we don’t even have a functioning site up yet, the fact that we are even listed in Google is a pretty amazing achievement.
The major rankings to-date are:
All The Web:
page 5 - compressed tee shirt, compressed tees
page 2 - tee compressed
Altavista:
page 5 - compressed tee shirt, compressed tees
page 2 - tee compressed
AOL:
page 3 - compressed tees
page 5 - compressed t-shirts
page 1 - tee compressed
Google:
page 4 - compressed tees
page 5 - compressed t-shirts
page 1 - tee compressed
Yahoo:
page 3 - tee compressed
There are several other search engines on the report but many get their data from the same place.
Click here or the image below for an HTML popup version of the report:
As you are beginning to see, launching a successful online e-commerce website involves more then just throwing up a couple of basic web pages with products. It requires planning, research, tracking and knowledge of your industry. Building your online business from all sides - design, programming, SEO and marketing is a keystone to your success or failure. You could say it’s like building a new house… you "could" skip hiring an architect and contractor and do it all yourself, but honestly should you? And having a team of professionals to guide you along the way is a must.
The latest, highly anticipated 5.5 release of MIVA Merchant is now available. The new release includes a long list of enhancements that really smooth-out some of the rough edges that has dogged MIVA for the past few years. MIVA has always been a favorite of programmers and developers but many considered it lacking the back-end usability and ease of use that most non-technical business owners desired. Checking orders and performing simple day-to-day operations of your online business wasn’t as intuitive as some other shopping carts. MIVA has taken great strides to improve this in this latest major release. 