"Going live" with a new website can also affect search engine traffic. For brand new sites, every page will need to be indexed by the search engines. The only requirement for the site owner is patience. Sometimes significant patience. A brand new website with a brand new domain name can take upwards of six months to be indexed and included in search engine results. There is no way around this. Search engines have been forced, by the proliferation of spam content, to be very conservative about when they include new sites and new pages into their databases.

The launching of a site re-design, however, has many search engine factors to consider. But before mentioning these, there is one search engine facet of going live with any site, new or redesigned, that should be addressed before a launch - optimizing the site's title tags. We've covered what title tags are and how they work many times in the past. Suffice it to say, utilizing each web page's title tag is by far the easiest and most overlooked search engine optimization opportunity available. Watch our video The Simple Secret of Search, or read our past newsletters (Search Engine Optimization Strategy, Who's Your Homepage?) for more information about this. But in terms of site launch, in addition to editing and approving content, plan on giving thoughtful and strategic consideration to each page's title tag before going live so that when the search engines do index the new site, the optimized titles will be in place.   next >