Is it possible to run Google webmaster tools over a website to diagnose if there are any faults on a site before the site has been made public?
We are looking to pick up any SEO / faults on a site before we make the site public, and also to make it the best possible indexible site for Google and Bing as soon as the site is rolled out.
Or is this the incorrect way of thinking about how to ensure that the site is as perfect as possible before having a site indexed?
For Google Webmaster Tools to work, your site would have to be publicly available and assigned a domain name.
You can use other tools to check your website for problems. For example, http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ which should help with many things prior to going public.
You will not be able to fully know how your will perform in search engines without research both prior to launch and after launch. You will not get SEO right when you first deploy your site, this is normal. It is only after your site has been deployed for a period that you will begin to know how it will perform. Much of this is because search changes rapidly and no one can predict how a site will perform until actual metrics are collected. From there, you simply make the necessary changes to perform better based upon the metrics you see.
