Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Written by Susan Johnson

February 8, 2006

Hi all,

First of all, thank you to everyone who supplied information regarding my last post requesting info about shopping carts for a comparison shopping site.  We still have not committed ourselves to any set cart program; still doing background research.

I have a couple more questions for LED'ers....

1) While we are in the process of developing the shopping site, looking for merchants, etc, we had thought of having a simple landing page with simply the logo and a brief (like one paragraph or so) explanation of the site and how it will work and a method to contact us for more info regarding site submission and subscriptions to the services.  This would be in the same color scheme, fonts, etc, as we anticipate the final comparison site to be in, but sort of like a Pre-Alert thing.

The purpose is to a) build our rankings in traditional search engines... Google, Yahoo, MSN..etc without spending a lot of money at first  b) build some excitement amongst any potential merchants / consumer subscribers c) give the sales force something to show to their sales targets.

Now, the big question is this... if we do this, and then when we have the site fully operational, if the site is hosted on a different server than the one that we are currently using, if the site has completely changed, will it hurt our rankings?  Will we essentially have to start all over again?  Or, if the domain name has stayed the same, should we be able to keep a decent placement?

2)  If we end up using an Adwords type of advertising campaign for OUR site, will our merchants ALSO be charged by Google or whomever? Part of our sales strategy will be that we are absorbing many of the advertising costs that the individual merchants would normally have to cover in order to enjoy a decent (I hope) position in the *big* search engines... so... if we would sign up Tom's TV around the corner (who doesn't even currently have a website, just wants to advertise his bricks and mortar goods' prices along side the chain-store competition and increase the awareness of his store's location, his prices and special services)  will he eventually get some huge invoice from Google or will we be charged and penalized for that in some way?

I know what logics are telling me, but as I have learned from reading this digest faithfully for years now, logics don't always rule in SEO, or SEM

Thanks again

Susan Johnson