Optimize your site before its launch

Most of the clients that come to me for getting their site optimized are the ones that have already got their site ready in place and are not satisfied with the traffic that they are getting. While suggesting them the methodology to be followed to optimize their site, quite often one reaches the situation where probably most part of the site is to be redone. This happens because of excessive use of flash without HTML text, not using Meta tags, title tags, poor or excessive key word density, heavy graphics etc.

This re-doing costs a lot of time and of course precious green bucks. It would be a great help if a site is well designed even before its launch so that later on getting optimized for traffic does not require much re-work on the site. A little extra work while designing will go a long way to get the site indexed faster even with the leading search engines as Google, yahoo or MSN.
Following these measures before launching a site would go a long way to improve the indexing and consequently everything that follows such as traffic, page rank, in bound links and so on.
First; a simple step that I believe most of designers do, is to research the popular keywords, Meta tags on the subject. Stuff the site with appropriate density of such keywords, ensure the site with good and appropriate title tags, Meta tags, Alt tags etc.
Second; Present the features of your site to other publishers who have sites on similar theme. Negotiate with them and convince them to get their links. An old site would be getting more frequent visits of spiders then the newer sites. When a search bot from the search engine will crawl those sites, it will inevitably find the link to your site and your site will be added to their index.
Third; don’t wait till last moment to get your domain registered. Register it as soon as possible after conceiving the idea for the site; you may get some links even before indexing of the site.
Fourth; put up the home page- and if possible add some content about what a visitor can expect from your site when launched and how your site would be better and different from others in the online place. Try putting a likely date of launch on the home page and do endeavor to stick to the date or amend the same with apology if the date is likely to be slipped. It may not work in some cases, but you can have a form on this home page for getting the email addresses of visitors who would like to be informed of the site launch. Before doing this, remember to put up your anti spam policy to allay the fears of the visitors.
Next- start discussion about the theme and content of the site on related forums and try to get feedback from visitors about the site theme and how you can improve the site content, what people can expect when it launches, and why your site will be unique.
Lastly and not the least; Write a few articles about the site content or related issues and submit to directories. Be sure to include a description of your new site
These few simple ideas should help you get a good head start for the site and you can expect to have faster traffic and ranking et al.