CheckList – 9 Steps to Ensure Before Launching a Website

Being first time entrepreneur, we missed out on a number of hygiene factors which we should have ensured for good performance of our website. We had to learn in the hard way. However, I made a list of all such critical steps, which I am sharing here. The following collection of steps provides a

1. Setup Google Analytics for measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing website usage. It is probably the best free software to get insights of your visitors, pages visited, traffic sources, bounce rate. Also it don’t forget to track Goals tracking & Events Tracking.
2. Add your web site to Google Webmaster Tool. It provides data, tools and diagnostics for a Google-friendly site. Google webmaster can inform you of the website crawling stats, indexing status and crawling errors. It will also help to find search related information and organic search terms, links to your site and internal links.
3. Generatesitemap for search engine & submit it on Google & Bing webmaster tool.  Sitemap is a way to let the search engines know about the regular updates on the site. Also crawlers can easily navigate through site using sitemap. It is important to submit validate sitemap to search engine – validate your sitemap here and submit to Google & Bing webmaster tool.
4. Check robots txt – It is used to direct search engine robot to crawl and index pages on their website. If there are files and directories you do not want indexed by search engines, do ensure to block it using robots.txt. Make sure you are not blocking important pages/directory with robots & but ensure to block unwanted pages. Test robots.txt file to see ensure absence of any errors.
5. Check site website load time – It is one of the very important factor, Google gives good page rank to the websites with low page load time.It should be as low as possible. Optimize your website with Google Page Speed Tool to reduce site load time. You can also check your website load time on the following link – Test Site Load Time.
6. Compress Asset– Now that you know, site load time is important, a useful technique is to – serve compressed assets such as Images, Java scriptand set expiry date of images and java script. One can use Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) for the same. It is free till a usage of 1 GB.
7. Set preferred domain– Google considers http://www.site.com and http://site.com as different from each other. If a preferred domain is not set, your PageRank and equity gets divided in two the two different domain. Setting preferred domain to a must to avoid such problems. Follow this guide to set preferred domain.
8. Setup Blog using Word Press or Tumblr. Your company blog adds value to your site and a frequently updated blog is an increasingly important way of being found on the web. Blogging is part of content marketing strategy and can drive good traffic to your website. Companies like Moz, 37signals, Kissmetrics and Hubspot have been able to successfully use content marketing for promoting their product. One can take inspiration from them.
9. Set outbound links to no follow– My website SoftwareSuggest.com, is a directory of business software. Hence, we had a lot of external links. When we launched, we did not make the external links no follow, hence were passing our PageRank to the other site. However, we were quick to correct it. If your website/blog has links to other website, ensue to make it a no follow. A no follow link does not pass on any PageRank juice to the targeted webpage but instead, it blocks off the Google PageRank flow. A website with too many follow links might be considered as a directory and will also invite unnecessary spam in form of comment.