Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

Through the years I have counseled people on launching hundreds of Web sites. Most of these people had a plan, a schedule, and rock solid deadlines they did not want to miss. Some of them realized pretty good results from their launches but none of them really did it right.

A lot of prep work should be done before you launch a new site. The first thing you should do, believe it or not, is launch a site — another site. Any site.

Preferably a blog, in my opinion.

Preferably a blog on Blogger or Wordpress (in that order of preference).

It doesn’t have to be your blog. It can be someone else’s blog where you merely cultivate a relationship with the blogger. Whether you write the blog yourself or allow someone else to write it doesn’t matter as long as the blog is there for you when you launch your new site.

It should be obvious I am suggesting you leverage an existing, established blog to help promote your new site. People who don’t have time to blog reduce their chances of building success on the Web. A few years ago that was not necessarily true but in today’s search environment blogs have become the engines of visibility and promotion.

It’s because blogs ping that they have become so important to search engine optimization. People get too focused on links and they don’t think about everything else that needs to be going on. A pinging blog alerts search engines and readers alike that there is something new to read — and if the audience has been cultivated properly they will come when you ping them.

A search engine should dutifully take your latest blog post and insert it into its Web search results immediately. The search engines won’t do that for little blogs with few posts. We all know that if you blog regularly (and say something people want to read) you’ll attract a few good links and build a readership and the search engines will learn that you produce new content regularly.

Imagine having that resource ready to tell people (and search engines) about your new site when you launch it six months down the road. Even a three-month launch window is enough time to condition a blog into producing value and reader referral traffic. You’re not looking for volume, you’re looking for quality — value. That one person who clicks through from the blog to your site might help you in ways you cannot imagine.

Of course, there are some ways to screw up this process. For example, you could spend your launch window blogging about your impending site launch. That’s a complete waste of time and effort. You should talk about anything and everything else BUT NOT YOUR SITE. Don’t even mention that you’re trying to launch a new site.

Another way to screw up the process is to give the blog such an off-topic focus that its readership (and relevance) to your site will never help you when you do launch that site. Let’s suppose you’re going to create an online hardware store. It would be better to discuss environmentally friendly home improvement projects and tools during your launch window than to dwell on the fascists holding power in Washington.

Finally, you should NOT allow yourself to obsess over the SEO strength of the blog. Don’t use “SEO-friendly” plug-ins. Don’t try to turn the blog into a great link bait idea (unless you specialize in creating truly successful link bait — which most SEOs do not). Just blog. Just create a good, decent, average, everyday blog that doesn’t get bogged down in the details of search engine optimization.

It’s a blog, not the next big SEO trick or technique. Nurture it until it matures into a solid partner site that can help influence your readers and the search engines into taking a look at and trusting your new domain.

One blog won’t conquer the search universe, but it will help you create visibility quickly at the most crucial moment in time for every Web site: when it is new and needs visibility the most.