Website Going Live In 5, 4, 3, 2,…

A website going live is always an exciting time, however, sometimes new (and existing) site owners have some confusion and make false assumptions about what will happen. This article is designed to address some of these issues in a clear and honest way.

As you know from working with us, we are very conservative when it comes to making predictions about your site’s placement within Google’s rankings. We have to be, we do not have control of Google, we can only employ techniques and methods that we know have worked for other companies we have worked with in the past and trust these will also work with your site.

So what is and isn’t going to happen when your website goes live? There are two different scenarios to look at, those of completely new websites and those of replacement websites.

Completely new website (i.e. your first site)

Some things to bear in mind when your new website goes live.

Google is not an instant service, you will need to type the web address in address bar of your browser.

The Address Bar is the area at the top of your internet browser (IE or Chrome) that you enter the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or web address of a site and it connects directly to the site.

The Search Bar is the form on the front page of Google (there are other search engines, but people only care about Google) into which you type a search phrase. Many people mistakenly type URLs into the Search Bar and then click on the website link showing in the search results.

It is so common for ‘Joe Public’ to type your URL into the Search Bar that you will see when you look at the stats for your site that one of the top ‘searched’ phrases is your domain name. This shows that people know of you, know your domain name, but do not understand how to ‘drive’ their computers or use the internet correctly.

Initially, your new website will not be listed in Google. From experience we know it can take up to a month for a search of your domain name to be found and listed in Google, never mind being found for what you offer.

This means is that if on day one of your site going live you try to find it by searching in Google (using the Search Bar) you will be disappointed as you are not going to find it.

Getting listed in Google is not an instant process.

We have had customers who truly believe that their site will be live on Monday morning and at the top ranking position by the same afternoon. This will not happen. That is not to say it will never be found, there are ways and means of modifying the content of your site so that it is more ‘search engine friendly’, but expecting such fast results is delusional.

With regards to being found in Google for ‘What you do’, not ‘Who you are’, the secret is good content. There are no tricks that you (or anyone else) can use to influence or fool Google into listing you faster or higher. Google is looking for good clear, easy to understand, relevant and recent content to present to its viewers.

If you choose to use our Website Angels service, we can probably help you to gain a higher place in Google by ensuring your site is presented to Google as effectively as possible. Similar to cleaning up a house for sale or getting dressed up smartly for a job interview, the better presented and the neater things are, the more likely it is that Google will start to take notice of your site and rank you in searches for your products and services. You will notice in the first sentence of this paragraph the word 'probably' was in bold text. This is because we cannot and do not guarantee our results. However, we do have a great deal of success in getting other sites found using the techniques we use to prepare a site for Google.

Other areas that the Website Angels service covers include the editing and streamlining of the information on your website to make it a more effective marketing tool, Competitor research and Google AdWord Management. If you would like to know more, please call or email us.

Launch of a revamped or replacement website

One of the key fears that clients have when relaunching a site is that they will lose their place in the Google rankings and that links on other sites will be broken.

Dropping in Google
We do not lie to clients. When you replace your site with a new one you may see a drop in Google listing placement about a week or two after the site goes live. This is generally because the new site has a different structure and includes different page names and file names for even those pages that were on the previous site.

The drop that happens is part of the process Google uses to reindex the site content and restructure where the site will appear in search results.

The system that W3 uses to build websites has been designed to allow Google to easily understand pages and it features a built-in XML site map system. The XML site map allows Google to index all the pages and rank them based on the content.

Once Google has reindexed the website, you will see your placement start to rise. Every single website we have rebuilt in the last 12 months has regained its original Google listing ranking, and in most cases, moved even higher.

Broken Site Links
Over time your site will become listed in numerous directories and other websites with links pointing to your site. Most link to the opening page of your site, so these will not be affected by the replacement of the site. However, in some cases individual pages within the old site are linked. When we replace the site with a new one the old pages addresses will no longer exist.

For example www.w3.co.nz/aboutus.php would be replaced by w3.co.nz/about

If you click on the aboutus.php link, you will see it goes to a page not found message. On this page there are links to allow people to navigate within the site and find what they were looking for.

The other thing to bear in mind when we replace your site with a new one, is adjusting any Google Adwords Campaigns you may have set up and ensuring that the adwords go directly to your new pages and not the old ones. If we are managing your adwords for you we will do this as part of the Website Angels service.

We hope this introduction to what happens when your site is either put live for the first time or replaced with a new site has helped to answer any questions you might have. If you would like to know more or have a specific question you need an answer to please do not hesitate to call.