Are you looking for launching a new website or thinking of redesigning the existing domain? This is really very interesting as well as little difficult task. You have to be very careful while launching or redesigning a website, nook and corner things has to be done perfectly to form a successful website.
I thought of preparing a checklist for the one’s who are finding difficulties in launching a new website.
Here are step by step checklist for launching a website.
Checklists to consider before launching a new website:
- Check out how your site is performing in search engines, benchmark how your website is currently performing in terms of visits. Look for your domain authority, how many pages are getting indexed by Google, Cache date of your landing pages, and also measure the crawl error report in webmaster tools. Take a note of this separately so that you can compare it with, once you launch your website.
- If you are ready to launch your website, you have to check it out with all the stakeholders that whether all the works performed by them are done completely and successfully. However there would be delay, if you are doing this for first time. Do not panic, everything is going to be alright after two to three terms.
- It’s important to register your website to webmaster tools. This will help your pages to get indexed in google and other major search engines. This also helps in tracking the crawl errors and optimization of pages.
- The important step to check before launching a website is choosing the domain for your website. Here you have to choose the right domain in order for google to index the right page. Here 301 redirects and canonical tags have to be given properly, check here for the detail understanding of 301 redirects and canonical tag.
- Uploading a ‘coming soon’ page is good before launching a website. You can sort out few explanations of you and your website and also add few keywords that you are targeting. By doing this , google start to index and crawl your new website. Uploading this page before 6-8 weeks of website launch is important.
- Take a note on inbound links and referrals of your website. You can check out this through google analytics, webmasters, open site explorer etc. You have to check whether these inbound links are pointing to your new website. Also through this you can redirect the traffic to your new website, which will gain you more advantage. As it takes time you have to perform this before few weeks of launching your new website.
- Take down all the old URL’’s that should be redirected to new URL’s, so that it would be easy for you to redirect one by one correctly and in the complete way, also you can control the correlation process instead of sending traffic to 404 page.
- The next step is to upload content like images, text, videos etc for your new websites. Check out the most viewed old web page and process the new site. Do not forget to link for better indexing.
- Title tag, meta tags, heading tags etc are very important.
- Implement Google Analytics tracking for your new website.
Checklists to consider when launching a new website:
- You have to redirect your old pages to the new web page, but remember to redirect to the similar and closest matching page for the better user experience. Do not delete any page in the old website, just redirect it. Here 301 permanent redirection is the right choice. You can also try out other redirects matching the position at the right place.
Eg of a best redirection:
www://oldpage.com/about-us is redirected as www://newpage.com/about-us
Eg of a bad redirection:
www://oldpage.com/about-us is redirected as www://newpage.com/
- You would be already having a google webmaster login for old website, so login and change the address to the new one. By doing this you are saying Google that, there are changes occurred to the entire site.
Checklists to consider after launching a new website:
- Check whether the robots.txt is given properly based on the website.
- Check if any 302 redirects pages are present that can be changed to 301 redirects.
- Check for google webmasters , if they are sending any errors messages.
- Check for any 404 pages are found.
- Check whether you have given right On Page Optimization for your website.
- Check whether your site can deliver successful results for the end users by providing contact us form working properly.
- Diagnose every aspects to consider.
- Check if there are any broken links.
- You have to communicate your website externally once it’s made live.
- Make an announcement of your live website through SEO Off page techniques, Email marketing etc.,
- Submit XML sitemaps to webmasters.
- Google Adwords will help you for the easy and rapid ranking.
- Submitting your website to local business directories will increase popularity.
- Promote your websites on Social media through various platforms available.
- Check whether your website supports mobile compatibility, because without this your website would be zero.
- Test the site speed.
Hope these step by step checklists for launching a new website will help you to achieve the successful results in the SERP’s. Monitor all your web traffic, crawl errors, traffic sources from google analytics and webmasters.
At first you may notice decrease in traffic, it will increase after 3 to 4 weeks, if you find still the traffic is not increasing you have to take several steps and follow the right guidelines and aspects in the correct path to increase your traffic and leads.
I wish all the very luck for launching your new website and to get succeeded. If i have missed any points , please do drop your precious and valuable comments in the comment section below, let’s discuss more and succeed on it.