Help website content/SEO question...

[jamel]

Hi,
So you get your niche you have your website or blog design idea but which comes first? should you write some content (5-10 articles) first so when you start your blog/website you have something to add to it to help it along and that can be climbing the SEO ladder or do you just get your blog/wsite up and add one page at a time as you come up with them...maybe it doesnt matter but thought maybe it might be good to have some good SEO content to add as soon as you have the design sorted rather than just a nice design with nothing yet to put in/on it...hmm another mad question me thinks..but all comments welcome

[lindastacy]

In my opinion, it's as important to launch a website or blog that will get visitors interested. Yes, SEO is very important, but who cares if you have a highly optimized site if no one reads it or comes back again? Content that interests your target market will interest the search engines too.

[AlexNewell]

Jamel - it all depends on the words you use. What do you mean by "design"?

The color scheme and the header graphic?

I d not think these things matter - what matters is choosing a good market and creating good quality content.

BTW the best SEO is high quality content.

You ask about what comes first - your readers comes first. what helps them most?

Do that!

:-)

[jamel]

I don't think I have written it clearly my question is again...should you have content (maybe a handful of articles) ALREADY written so when you go on to set up your blog/website you have content to add immediately as opposed to nothing written if you have started with your website/blog design first? hope this has made my question clearer....

[ideaqueen]

Well, I don't think it really matters. Even if you do have a ton of content to start, you've got time to tweek your design. Appearing in the search engines doesn't happen overnight, and it's going to take awhile for them to crawl your brand new site.

There's also nothing that says you can't be doing both at the same time. Set your blog/site up, throw up some content should mood strike you, and then go off to work on the design. Actually, web design and content are both never-ending jobs so you'll have to balance the two eventually anyway.

[wade_watson]

I think when you're starting up it's nice to stimulate frequent checks by search engines by updating frequently. When I have a site "under construction", which means getting the design, navigation and utilitarian pages right, I keep it from being crawled. Then I place maybe 4-5 important pages/posts on it and schedule additional pages to be posted every day for a month or so. You're not likely to have much traffic during that time anyway and it makes your site look very active.

Wade Watson

[TMichaelRogers]

When I choose to create a new niche site, I always focus on things in this order: keyword/niche analysis (is there enough interest in this niche to warrant my working on it), create the site (typically using wordpress and a pretty theme), start creating content as often as I can (I don't worry about precreating content) and then start using social media, email and word of mouth to start promoting it.