Building up content before going live

Hello there,

This is my first post but I've been browsing for quite a while. I've had a personal website for quite a while, which I've recently started monetizing. Nothing major coming in at the moment, and I doubt I will as it's not that type of site, plus I don't want loads of ads all over the place. It's more of a portfolio. I've had a few other sites for other bits and pieces over the years as well. I doubt this was relevant to my question, but I thought a little bit of background is better than coming in firing questions and generally looking like a noob.

I'm in the process of setting up a website for my chosen niche. It will be informative, not just a 10 page spam fest. It's something I am really interested in, and there's only a few sites with decent information about it. It has millions of monthly searches, and I feel I can tap into this market, not only to make money, but to help consolidate information for people, and for me to learn about it in the process!

I'm going to be making the site in WordPress as I have used this before, and am comfortable editing the various PHP files. My plan is to post regularly to the site, hopefully every day when I get time. I plan to have the site inaccessible for a few weeks until I have reached about 30-50 posts or so. I will disable access in the robots.txt and htaccess as well as in WordPress. When I feel the site has enough content, and I'm happy with the themeing, I will make the site live and allow search engine access to it.

I've looked around this forum and the web and not found a definitive answers. Various guides suggest having a lot of content before going live, but fail to identify the way they do it. My reasoning to doing it this way is that all the posts will have their proper dates on them, and when Google is allowed access, it will pick up on this, rather than loads of posts on a single day.

1. Is this approach the best way? Would it be better for SEO if the site was live from the word go rather than disabled and activated with a lot of content.?
2. Are search engines pretty quick at picking up changes to the robots file? Do I risk Google not picking up my site for months if it had previously been told not to browse it?

Apologies for such a long first post! I suppose the question is...

Would it be better to

1. Have site live from the word go and publish posts as I go along,
2. Have site live but only save posts as drafts when I have wrote them, and publishing them all in one go when I have enough content,
3. Disable all site access and build in a sort of offline mode, and grant access when I have enough content.

Thanks,
Mibix

get xampp, build the site on your computer and when it's done transfer it to your hosting.

Google likes to see new sites steadily adding content plus it takes a while to index plus add to that the time it takes to create backlinks. I see no advantage with the "all at the same time" approach. You're not going to get instant authority because you added 50 pages, not for a new site.

I thought about going the xampp route, but thought it would be a bit of a nightmare trying to get everything merged to my current hosting / database.

I will just go with the steadily adding content route.

Cheers

To my mind it just depends on how sure you are concerning the structure of the site.

If you are sure and everything is set up such that you just have to pust content, go live.

On the other hand, if you think you will have to adjust the structure and layout considerably, pre-build the page. Manual building the redirects can be a huge pain!

I say just build the site online. Its not like you'll be getting a ton of visitors on a new site with barely any content anyways.
Plus I think google does favor a site that grows in content over time.

I would post a few pages (Homepage, Contact Me, Private Policy, etc.) and a few posts (2-5) and then set the site live. The sooner the better and adding content on a daily basis will serve you well.

I agree with everyone else, build the site live as you go. From my personal experience, you will probably notice that some posts will get more traffic than others. So you will learn which topics and types of posts are more popular than others. Posting live as you go gives you the benefit of learning as you go along and incorporating what you have learned in future posts.

To my mind it just depends on how sure you are concerning the structure of the site.

If you are sure and everything is set up such that you just have to pust content, go live.

On the other hand, if you think you will have to adjust the structure and layout considerably, pre-build the page. Manual building the redirects can be a huge pain!

Click to expand...

What he said , but if you think your site is pretty straight forward, get that content out there ASAP. You wand to have orginal indexed content out there in WWW land for as long as possible prior to engaging in your offPage SEO activities.

Amazing everybody thanks for the replies. I made the basic structure all as draft pages (about, privacy, contact etc.) and the same with the categories for the navigation. As soon as I had a clear structure layed down I was happy with, and ~5 posts to have content for most my categories (they are in the nav bar), I took them all live.

Seems to make sense. I've done as much structuring as I can - I don't think the site will get 'bigger' in the sense of categories or widening the niche. Just content, content, content!

Also, will be editing theme as I go along - mostly just CSS stuff and PHP editing. Won't be much layout change, just size / colour / font / wording.

Thanks again!

Buy a domain, set up hosting and wordpress, start writing. That's the best method IMO.

good luck dude. I'm on the same boat.

Some marketers (including myself) add at least 10 pages of content to the site before it goes live. However, your site is already live (if I understand correctly), so it would be pointless to prevent spiders visiting your site for some time (while you are adding content).

OP, lol...

Just do it...make it alive from the very first second.