SEO Step-by-Step Guide– 198. Splash Pages

As the holiday season is approaching, many websites will try to promote their businesses with attractive offers and discounts. Many companies are busy in getting their splash pages designed to announce their customers regarding their fabulous discounts and new products. Splash pages help websites protect the integrity of the website and at the same time it allows them to announce to their customers and visitors about the good things they have to offer. Though this is one of the best ways of promoting your holiday sales, you need to implement it very carefully so that it does not affect your website in any negative way.
If you are not careful with your splash page design, you can make your website unfriendly to the search engines. Splash pages are often developed using Flash and we know it already that Flash takes a long time to load and search though sophisticated they are look at flash pages with contempt. All along you may have used highly optimized pages for fast loading and when you suddenly through a heavy splash page, it is going to throw the search engine bots off balance.
You would certainly want your announcement page/splash page to be impressive but you can easily frustrate the holiday shopper if you don’t pay attention. Heavy splash pages not only will make your website unfriendly to search engines, they also become less user friendly. Holiday shoppers are impatient and they don’t have the time for your fancy splash page that is heavily laden with Flash content to load. So make it light, let it be something simple but at the same time attention grabbing. Never compromise on the usability of your website as this can affect your sales level. The last thing you would want is drop in the sales during holiday season. You can also lose your existing ranking because of the slow loading page that you have introduced with the intention of promoting your sales. This will not only affect your holiday sales but also your long terms sales chart. So think twice and review several times before you add your splash page to the website because you would certainly not want to make the search engines and the visitors unhappy during the holiday season when you are expecting the highest sales.
If your website and product are brand new, then it is best not to use splash pages, because you need a lot of retention power that normally comes with brand familiarity. So your splash page efforts may work against your own goals. Always take into consideration long term repercussions of your efforts because if something goes wrong, it will take a long time to bounce to your original status. It is best to discuss with your SEO company before you make your holiday promotion plans.

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