Why having a great holding page for your new website is key! Read on…

Over the last week the Integrati team have been flat-out working on the new Integrati Marketing site. As part of the process of building a new site on a fresh Domain or website name such as; integrati.com.au has been registered for the new site. A great way of showing the world and to start to being ‘found’ by internet search engines is to have a ‘holding page’ on your new web website or Domain Name.

A holding page does essentially, “what it says on the tin”, it lets you create a soft launch of the new site by creating a single web page. This allows for ‘good things to happen’ like being found by search engine bots, robots or more correctly web crawlers. This helps your new ‘get found’ as when a web crawler finds your site it means your on your way to start page ranking in Search Engines (SE) for your site.

Also after a web crawler has found your site it will check ‘intermittently’ back to your site. A really important area which many sites forget about with web crawlers are Site maps. Whilst I believe it would be overkill to have a site map on a holding page (as it really is one page such as “integrati.com.au” when you launch the full site you absolutely need an xml. file with a Site map or Site map in your directory.

So, if you want to have your site accurately ranked by Search Engines then you must make sure that you have a Site map in your website!

So what, does a holding page look like? Well you can obviously have a look at our site now at integrati.com.au until we launch. Here is a screen shot of what the Integrati Marketing holding pages looks like.

Also, you may have noticed (if you clicked through to the site before launch) that there is an opportunity for interested users to register their interest with Integrati Marketing by “subscribing by email“.

This is important as it allows for the holding page to be put to work straight away and for the site to build up a user list of email addresses which can be informed when the site goes live. It is also a great way to potentially build partnerships with prospective customers and service providers early on.

There are some other important areas you will need to consider as well, such as;

• If you do not have a holding page it will either come up with a generic error page (page not found 404) or worse from your company’s perspective send them off to your Domain Registrar which is an ad for them not you!
• As we know by getting your site up starts the ‘page ranking’ which should improve the sites ranking in its first weeks and months at launch
• Opens your site up to be linked to again helping your page rank
• If you can be found you should be able to be contacted, so email, phone number, mail address are all options you can consider for your holding page
• Also, your site is a direct communications platform to create brand awareness and position your business in the market you choose to serve

Overall there are more benefits to creating a landing page than drawbacks, that’s why the Integrati team built ours.

Until till next time, the Integrati team.