Hi there, I wanted to ask you DP members if doing some SEO for a site which is online but isn't finished yet would be a smart thing to do? Have a nice day
Sure why not...If its something competitive, you arent going to rank for it right away. You might want to reconsider if its something really easy and a small niche market where people could remember that the site is a complete disaster.
you are supposed to do onpage optimization as you go. in terms of link building, you want to save your major link building campaign till the site gets done but you should at the same time start building a few links and do a few submissions like social bookmarking and article submission, etc to announce the presence. keep building a few links here and there while you work on your site and launch full scale link building once the site is done
You could do a few directory submissions, but I personally prefer to get a website pretty much up to speed before I start going full on with promoting it. I sort of like google to think (or imagine it thinking) 'oo, there's a new website with lots of unique pages I never saw before'. All the sites I've built up first then marketed afterwards have done better anyway. For me the worst, and saddest, thing ever is an 'under construction' or 'coming soon' page
I always submit a site to the SEs as soon as I give my clients a domain - I always design a holding page and make sure it is indexed straight away with an xml sitemap pointed to from robots.txt If you're "just messing" and the file structure could change as you're designing then I'd keep that away from being indexed, e.g. keep the site on a test server or in a folder that is specifically restricted from being spidered, just to make sure. However, if you have a solid structure in place, you're confident the structure/file names/paths will not change but you're still building content then getting the pages indexed asap cannot harm you too much.
Always is important to make SEO, even if the website isn't finished yet. Making SEO it's an important thing everytime to let you know on the internet, if you wnat to make SEO don't think twice.