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 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.