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!
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