SEO before products on ecommerce site

[art_litho]

Our company plans to quickly launch an e-commerce site to sell religion themed banners (religionbanners.com). We'll have our products up on the site in about a week.

1. Should I block Google from accessing the site during this period?

2. Is there anything wrong with starting simple SEO tasks such as submitting the site map on Google Search Console prior to us having the products on the site?

[art_litho]

Thanks for the help!

[art_litho]

Thanks for the help Mike!

[Mike.Bean]

Yes, URL Structure is a huge issue and make sure you nail it right away. Changing it is the longest and scariest process you can go through. Here are 4 main things to look into when figuring out a url structure.

URL Uses Only Standard CharactersIf you only use characters that are common in URLs, it makes it easier for more users to access and interpret your URL. Not all users have keyboards that can easily enter less common characters, or browsers that support the display of these characters, and some special characters can look spammy. Using only standard characters can also avoid potential problems with your search engine ranking.

Use Keywords in your URLUsing your targeted keywords in the URL string adds relevancy to your page for search engine rankings, assists potential visitors identify the topic of your page from the URL, and provides SEO value when used as the anchor text of referring links.

Minimize URL LengthSearch engines often truncate the URL display at 75 characters and appear to pass less keyword value in longer URLs. We also recommend using fewer than three subfolders in your URL to make it easier for search engines to parse.

Use Static URLsUsing a static URL can improve your performance in search engine rankings. Moz's correlation research shows that URLs with dynamic parameters have dramatically worse performance in the rankings. Using dynamic parameters does not necessarily cause worse rankings, but there does appear to be a correlation, and they generally do lead to lower click-through rates. Dynamic URLs are also a common source of duplicate content.

(straight from On Page Grader)

[Bio-RadAbs]

From my experience, change always happens..

• People might request a change in URL structure (then it will lead to 301 redirects and setting them up)
• It's better to let Google crawl a rich page than a weak page. When it comes to ecommerce sites, you don't want "page not found" as the product hasn't been published but its category page is done. If the sitemap leads to broken pages - well, customers won't like it, so don't expect bots to do either.
• I would work on your ecommerce site, get it done in preview and all ready to go. You can also setup things like Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster tools, ensure your sitemap is ready, url structure is fine and get it ready.

So my advice is to set it up and then launch. You don't want to end up "fixing" your website post launch.  Here's another way to look at it.. your credit score - it's easier to work on building a good credit score, than having to fix a bad one. SEO is the same.

[Mike.Bean]

1. Should not be necessary.

2. You have to take everything one step at a time. Start with what you are comfortable with and then learn the things you are not.