I am developing a new site that will take some time before it is ready to go online.

Would there be any benefit as far as gaining search engine recognition, to put up an optimised home page saying the site is under constrution, but containing my search terms and keywords or is it preferable to wait until the site is complete?

Personally, I would put up a holding page (to let anyone who is interested you do own the domain and give contact details), but not let google crawl it until the site is ready.

 

I would add the following into your robots.txt

 

(# Make changes for all web spiders)

 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

 

 

What could happen if you put up an optimised home page, is google sees your site not update for a month or so, then not re-visit it for another month or two even when you have updated it.

 

This can cause some confusion with the extra pages, and can see very slow results from SEO in the future.

I am developing a new site that will take some time before it is ready to go online.

Would there be any benefit as far as gaining search engine recognition, to put up an optimised home page saying the site is under constrution, but containing my search terms and keywords or is it preferable to wait until the site is complete?

 

Absolutely - get your title and headings tags in and a paragraph of text in the body. Although, how long will the site take you? If you are talking under a week then I wouldn't bother personally.

 

Andrew Wheeler

Many thanks for your advice.

If like us you bang sites up pretty quickly I would just go for it and let Google crawl straight away. As you add to the website you have constantly changing content which of course google loves so it keeps coming back for more. This means that you have trained google to keep coming back often which is great, however if it will take you several weeks to get any valuable content on the site then do as suggested above.