What an Alt Tag/Attribute and Link Love Can Do for a Temporary Home Page

So by the way, I'm starting a new company with two power houses in the women's entrepreneurial world (official announcement to come). And in doing so, we are building a mega website with lots of fun function for promoting your business. The purpose of today's post, however, is to demonstrate how a brand new URL with very little content and a lot of secrecy is already ranking Page 1 #2 of Google for the company name in as little as 6 days (could be less, this is just when I checked) without submitting to any directories or sending any requests to link to other websites.

Step 1: Buy the domain. Duh.

Step 2: While you build the core of your website, put up a temporary home page. But don't put up a giant image with your company logo and text saved in Photoshop or something. Go the extra mile and make the individual images that are not text, like your logo, and create content to go onto your page. Pay the programmer extra to do this for you. It's worth it. Google and other search engines will be able to start crawling what text, links and images you do have on there.

Step 3. If you have images, you have the opportunity to fill in the "alt attribute" sometimes known as the "alt tag". This tells blind people what image is appearing if they can't see it (it's spoken to them). Or if a person has images turned off on their Internet in order to load pages faster (aka not sucking down images), they can read what image would have been there. These alt attributes are considered by Google, so if you can, and if it makes sense to what the image actually is, include your keywords in these alt attributes.

Here is a screenshot of how my search term "collective e" is finding the keywords on the web page:


This picture shows how the search results are displaying the copy on the page. In bold, in the search results, Collective E is displayed. But as you see here in the picture, circled red, Collective-E is an image of a swirly font. Therefore, it is not actual text. To put "alternative" text there, for computers to read, we inserted "Collective E". It is that alt="Collective E" that is seamlessly being displayed in the search results.

Step 4: Find reasons to put links on your temporary home page. Gives search engines more to travel through on your site, and one more reason why you might look like a worthwhile and helpful website.

Step 5: If you have a blog, link to your new website from your blog on your side panel, like I did.

Step 6: Start Tweeting about your new website at Twitter.com to your friends, and include the URL in the tweet. Try to use the actual URL instead of a TinyURL, just for ultimate impact's sake. Google is returning tiny Tweets in its search results, so make sure you're lookin' good!

Step 7: Find a reason to blog about your new company, and include the company name, Collective-E, in the blog post. And link to it (as shown).

You are well on your way to building a solid foundation for a well optimized site. When you do launch, your content will be searched all the quicker by the mack daddy search engines. Just think - you haven't even built the Facebook Page for it yet (a Facebook Page is a public access page that search engines index), or added it as a Company or a Group in LinkedIn!