So you're starting your Dating or Social Networking site... You have it running and need final changes to go out marketing!

I have found an interesting article on how to start your site promotion even before your site's up and running! The authors state that while your design team is busy being creative, your web development team has a task list of their own to start, you can set up a smart "Under Construction page" at your domain.

This article will 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:
1) It lets people know that there is a new business coming in case they stumble upon your website for some reason.

In this case you should put up: a coming soon banner, and a text to 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.

2) Getting users into your database - put up a simple newsletter sign up form (or registration 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.

3) Starting 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 head start on ranking your site.

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