Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.

Author: Web Design Mauritius 10 comments April 23, 2010

You might have been working on a new website project for some time or are planning to launch a new site. You have prepared your project, secured your host and domain name and prepared your database. You will now be heading for either deployment or development but know that your site will not be online for some time. You will most of the time use a dummy, a “coming soon” page. This page must be optimised for search engines!

Anatomy of a “coming soon” page.

Most of you have heard of “coming soon” pages. There’s a huge collection of those online teasers for great new apps or sites that will be found on the server some time in the future. For many projects, a deadline for launch is settled, for others the launch can vary from a week to a year in extreme cases, and maybe more… So it might be a good thing to prepare your “coming soon” page.

Such page usually consists of:

  • Information on what the future website will be about.
  • What the website will be marketing.
  • Launching date.
  • Update/launch signup forms to acquire prospects.
  • Providing short updates for buzz.

Other uses?

Many companies use their “coming soon” page to pre-establish their brand-name by working a lot on the visual impact and the message. Other strategies include the creation of Twitter accounts to gather some followers as well as Facebook pages, all interlinked with the “coming soon” page. There is a lot to get from such a page but you can try getting even more by SEO-ing the page.

Why should you SEO it?

The “coming soon” page must be optimised for search engines for many reasons. First of all we must take one important fact into consideration with search engines basing ourselves on the Google algorithm.

The Google Sandbox.

Google gives weight to older pages and domain names. This is why the Google Sandbox exists. It is here to prevent younger sites from hitting on older ones which already have the big G’s respect. You might not know when your site will be launched but optimising it will help you have an online presence and above all be out of the Google Sandbox when you launch it if you have been lagging a bit behind.

Nurturing your future ranking.

You have competitors on your main keyword on Google. Optimising your “coming soon” page for that keyword will get the domain name and the page to start competing for better rankings on it. At the time of the launch you might even be surprised by how fast your ranking will be evolving. This is one extremely good reason to do this.

Getting Google page rank.

Google page rank is one thing some webmasters live by. Even if it is not as important a factor as it was before it is an indication of the good health of a site. Good page rank is simply built through backlinks and site age. If your site is taking a whole year for launch, why should you lose one year’s PR and backlinks (which you can start building through comments or links from other sites)? A good example is inhousegrind which has a Google page rank of 3 while still bearing a “coming soon” page.

Let’s talk about this.

Using search engine optimisation techniques for “coming soon” pages is a great option on a whole site’s SEO. All the SEO juice gained over the “coming soon” period will be redistributed to the other parts of the website when the latter is launched. I have personnally tested and used this technique and the returns are always positive. Why not try it then?


About the Author:
Sachin D. Brojmohun has extensive experience in terms of graphic design, CSS integration, usability and accessibility as well as in SEO. More about him and the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius here: Web Design Mauritius.

Comments (10)

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  1. Robyn from Sam's Web Guide
    Twitter:
    says:
    April 23, 2010 at 1:11 pm

    This is an extremely vital strategy Sachin. I will definitely implement this for my future projects.
    Before this technique is used, its very important to have a solid and sure plan that is already confirmed by the team. This ensures that no major changes, like a domain name change, takes place when its time to launch. If that happens then the Pagerank would be lost.

  2. Girish
    Twitter:
    says:
    April 23, 2010 at 1:59 pm

    Hey thanks for the tips. Never thought these pages could be that important. :lol:

  3. Keith says:
    April 24, 2010 at 2:54 pm

    Tottaly goes to show how early SEO strategy should be considered when building identity on the web… In this day and age (there’s a thousand websites for everything these days, it seems!), every little bit helps.

  4. Kurt Avish
    Twitter:
    says:
    April 25, 2010 at 7:36 am

    Seriously this is one thing I never thought about. (Weird). I do have some domain names awaiting some free time from me start on. But right now I only have a under construction page with no meta desc or keywords and title.
    Going to edit these right now.
    Kurt Avish´s recently wrote: Emtel Wimax, MyT and ADSL Attacked By Somalian Pirates

  5. Omer Greenwald
    Twitter:
    says:
    May 8, 2010 at 10:53 am

    Very interesting. As a web developer I have never given much thought to the coming soon page but your post really convinced me there is a good reason to do this.
    The only thing to remember is to remove the coming soon URL (or cached version) from Google search results (you can do that using Google Webmaster Tools).
    Great post, Sachin.