What is a holding page? Is my business losing traffic without a holding page?

Why have a great holding page for my new website domain name before I launch my site? 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; www.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 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 Sitemaps. 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 Sitemap or Sitemap 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 Sitemap in your website!

So what, does a holding page look like? Well you can obviously have a look at our site now at www.integrati.com.au until we launch. Here is a screenshot 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.

 

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Connect or Die: The Network Service and the future of your business!

Well, we have all seen the rise and rise of Google and the importance of being able to find ‘stuff’ on the world wide web. Many of you may not remember the WWW before Google when you had to go to portals and lists of links like boards to find ‘stuff’ you were interested in.

Today we search sites like Bing and Google and we use these site to serve up paid links/ads on these sites to drive targeted traffic to our own sites. This model is what has made Google billions of dollars. It works, I am not denying this at all and I happily use AdWords and love all the reporting which you receive as part of the service on the dashboard.

So, this is all known and works, so what is this new term The Network Service? Well, it is a new term coined by an analyst of web 2.0 Sean Parker. In many ways I think it actually sounds like an outdated ‘network’ term but what Sean is actually referring to is  Social Networking.

Web 2.0 logos

Sean Parker, has created a thesis that he believes that the power of search is limited in that:

1. Companies that Harness the power of networks will dominate the internet
2. Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people

Well, let’s have a look at point one, in effect what Sean is saying is that whilst being able to find stuff on the WWW is still important (and will remain so) what is really important is being able to be leverage your connections to find ‘stuff’ faster and well with Trust. I think that is something which people have left out of the argument. In essence you trust a search engine to search that is it. But with a social network, the power of the search is in the TRUSTED reference. In other words the people you link to on MySpace, Facebook and professionally on Linkedin. So these Social Networking companies are all in line for being more valuable than Google and Bing and even poor old Yahoo.

Because… well because as Sean has stated collecting, aggregating , filtering and presenting data to a single user via search will be less important than collecting people!

That is what Social Networking is all about, it is the ability to tap into your known networks of trusted groups and individuals. This is not new, in fact it has been around since humans have been, what is different is that on the WWW it is able to connect you anywhere, any time on a device of your choosing. The Anthropologists and Sociologists have studied this and it is a cause celeb for them, they call it Tribal!

Tribal networks are the ability to use your trusted network or tribe for reference, reassurance and acceptance, except this is different to the periods of mass consumerism to the late 1990’s. In that geographically you can be linked into a ‘tribe’ anywhere in the WWW and share the same values and traits.

Now, I know you are thinking, “yeah but I am a small business owner what has this got to do with my business?” Well in my opinion it is simple, the saying was “Change or Die” (in other words innovate your business before your competitors do) now I believe it is Connect or Die. And, this is where the small business has a massive opportunity, not only does your business have excellent customer service and great products but you KNOW the Customer!

In marketing one of the biggest advantages is knowing your ‘target market’ your customers, If you use Social Networking as a business tool now to connect and foster a ‘tribe’ of your customers you will be building a sustainable competitive advantage – You will sell more to your customers than ever before.

Now, I have written enough about Sean’s basic premise and I won’t make your eyes bleed with anymore discussion here, in fact I you can read Sean’s presentation here from Scribd.com or directly from the Integrati.com.au Public Dropbox here in MS PowerPoint.

Now, Sean also talk’s about the Network Effect, I will cover this off in my next post, I will be interested to hear your thoughts as well.

Till next time,

The Integrati team.