What’s involved in launching a website?

You just flick a switch and it’s live, right?

Not quite.

This article explains a little about what happens when we spring into action when a client gives us the go ahead to launch a website…

Keyword whatnots

In all likelihood, we will have done keyword research right at the beginning of the website build, in order to make sure all the page names and content already include the key terms. However, we will now go over to the Google keyword tool and feed in some data, to get a good idea of what search terms are hitting the big time and which are languishing. We also look at competitor data to see if there are any hidden gems that no one knows about that we can use to get some quick wins.

Armed with this information, we will then go through the site with a fine-toothed comb, sprinkling the keywords in all the right places, including: unique titles, meta descriptions, keyword metatags, internal links and footer links. All this encourages Google to rank your site highly for exactly the right searches.

Watermarked images replaced with finals

If there are any stock photos in the site, then we’ll go ahead and make the final purchases, and replace the fuzzy watermarked ones with shiny, sharp versions.

Links checked

We use an automated link checker to double check all the links in the site and ensure none of them are broken – a no-no for any site, old or new.

Cross browser check

We carry out a final cross browser check to make sure nothing squiffy happens to the design if users decide to view it in a browser that we haven’t been using during the development process. As standard we support Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and up, Chrome and Safari.

Submit the new site to the search engines

Not strictly necessary, as the search engines do their own crawls and will find all new sites anyway, but we like to do this in any case. If it gets the site climbing a few days earlier, then that can’t be bad.

Test emails and forms

The vast majority of our websites will come equipped with a contact form, so we make sure we test that that’s working hunkey dorey, as well as any email addresses we’ve set up.

Site registered and verified with Google

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, if you want your website to have any success, you have to keep Google happy. To that end, we register all websites with Google webmaster tools and Google analytics and verify ownership so they can let us know if they think anything’s amiss.

Google site map created and verified

Another small step in the googleification of the site, we create a Google standard sitemap, which lists all the pages in the site, and verify that sitemap with Google.

Non-content pages blocked from indexing

We use a robots.txt form to let Google know that we don’t really want it to index the legal disclaimer pages of the site – otherwise, due to the density of their content, they can bounce up to the top and don’t really look right all the way up there.

Depending on the site, there may be more steps we carry out – but there you have the standard elements of our website launch procedure!

Click here to read full article about website launch procedure and why a website is better than an advert in a newspaper