UltimateSource: Best Practices For Launching a New Website

Website Launch Checklist

I have over three years of Internet Marketing experience. I prefer to focus on

Analytics, CRO, SMM, Local SEO and Link Earning.

Search has become more localized and personalized over time and this is

exciting to me. Companies who are able to capitalize on these changes will

eventually emerge on top.

“

“

You’ve worked months for this, maybe even years.

Launch day is fast approaching, but

it’s easy to forget a fewbe careful,critical items when your finger is itching to hit to

“Go” button.

It’s important that you complete this

CHECKLISTbefore your site says to the world!

To avoid an SEO disaster, you need a

well-defined plan for every stage of the process.GO LIVE

Website is an extension of

your BRAND and your BUSINESS

Hopefully this checklist will

have you well on your way to a

successful launch!

1. URL Redirection

Make sure you advise

your programmer to do

PERMANENT301 redirect

CHECKMake sure that you

the server response code

2. RUN XENU

You can see some really useful data:

Tip: When you see any broken link in Xenu i.e. with status as “not found”, right click on

that link and select URL properties. You will be able to see all those pages from where

the broken url is linked.

• Status code of all pages

• Type of page crawled

• All external links

• Title tag and meta description

3. CHECK YOUR SITE FOR

DUMMY CONTENT

LOREM IPSUM SCANNER DUMMY TEXT CHECKER

This tool will scan your

website for popular

placeholder text such as:

“Lorem ipsum, sunt in culpa, coming

soon, under construction, asdf, qwert,

etaoin shrdlu, now is the time for all

good men, the quick brown fox, test

image, test description, for placement

only”

4. SUBMIT XML SITEMAP

Once the site is live, you need

to create a xml sitemapwhich contains all URLs of

your site.

Tips: Before submitting sitemap, you can use “Fetch as Google” option in Google

Webmaster Tools and you can confirm whether Google bot can access your site.

5. TEST AND OPTIMIZE

YOUR SITE SPEED

Website speed is a factor which affects

user experience and also a factor for ranking in Google.

Tip: If you are bit more techie, you can install PageSpeed module on Apache or Nginx in

your server. This will help you decrease your website load speed.

You can use

Google Page Speed Insights Toolfor checking the site load speed.

6. ENSURE TRACKINGCODES ARE WORKING

• Google Analytics Code

• Google Adwords Conversion Code

• Google Remarketing Code

• Other codes which were implemented in the old site

Tip: Google provides a free tool called Tag Assistant which can help you to detect various

Google related tags.

7. SECURITY & LAW

• Ensure to use strong Username/Password

• Install security plugin to avoid DB injects, hacking, etc.

• Ensure CMS, plugins, modules are the latest version

• Ensure site complies with regional anti-spam laws

• Limit the number of time someone can attempt to log in

• Monitor for malware

• Ensure regular automatic backups

8. GENERAL

• The contact address, phone numbers on the site are correct.

• captchas are functioning properly.

• Favicon is added.

• Ensure social media icons link to the right page.

• Cross browser checks.

• Validating site using W3C validator

• No duplicate content by using CopyScape

• Check how your site look in different screen sizes. Use Screenfly

to test this

• Ensure that the site is not blocked with robots.txt

• If your site is WordPress, ensure to uncheck “Discourage search

engines from indexing this site”

If you correctly follow tips mentioned

in this blog, you’ll avoid major issues

which could result in complete loss of

visits/conversions, i.e. your worst

case scenario when launching a new

site!