Blog posts tagged HTML

Ten things to consider before your website goes live

Before you launch your new website make sure you get these ten fundamental tips right. This checklist will ensure you are maximising your web presence by having a strong search engine ranking position for targeted keywords in your industry.

1. Cross browser checks

Make sure you have done a thorough check on all popular browsers before your website goes live. The ones to check are IE 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome and Opera.

2. Check that all your links works

Although it may seem like an obvious tip, use a free tool like Xenu Link Sleuth to check for dead links on your website.

3. Create a custom 404 Page

Design a custom 404 page to ensure users aren’t clicking off your site if they come across a dead link. Use this page to give users popular links and a search facility for them to continue to find the right page.

4. Choose the right keywords

Keyword research is highly important when constructing content for your website. Pick two or three word terms as these are easier to work with and are known to have a higher conversion rate than single word terms.

For instant traffic to your website, use Google Adwords Sponsored Links. These ads are typically displayed across the top in a beige colour and down the right hand side of the search results. However, be aware that your campaign may cost you a lot of money if incorrectly set up and monitored.

Add a blog to your website but don’t use your blog to only talk about your products, instead discuss non-commercial topics which will help to drive traffic to your website i.e. a guide to buying the right widgets.

5. Make sure your title tag includes keywords

Make sure each page of your website has a unique <title> tag and that this tag starts with the keyword targeted to this page. For instance:

<title>Metal Widgets | Buy Aluminium, Brass and Steel Widgets for sale at Bobs Engineering</title>

In this example, the title tag has additional information such as different types of metal and selling messages like “for sale”. Also notice the company name is at the end.

6. Consider your meta description for high CTR

To attract a high number of visitors via Google, consider your meta description tags. Use this tag to display your unique selling point such as:

“Free next day delivery on our award-winning Leather Sofa – guaranteed to be the lowest price sofas for sale online”

7. Proofread and check your site

Get your family and friends to check all details on your website before it goes live – this includes phone numbers, email addresses, addresses and names. Ensure all your place-holer text has been removed!

Make sure each page of your website contains at least 50 words of exclusive content. Pay particular attention to product details and category descriptions and ensure you include the target keyword for that page.

Don’t be tempted to copy text from other people’s website or catalogues as this will incur a duplicate content penalty from Google. You can test how unique your content is for free at http://www.copyscape.com/.

8. Use a sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster tools

Generate an XML Sitemap and submit it to the Webmaster tools of Google, Bing and Yahoo. Using GWT, you’re able to diagnose any crawl issues with your website and get statistics on which pages on your site are broken and how many pages on Google have been indexed when the site is launched.

9. Use Google Analytics

To analyse and monitor the success of your website, set up a Google Analytics account. This way you can measure the traffic to your website and keep an eye on visitor retention. It is also a useful tool for checking the success of your keywords and highlights what people are searching for.

10. Contact authority sites for valuable links

Once your website is launched, the next stage to improving your ranking for a particular keyword is to have a significant number of links to your website using your target term as the clickable text link. This can take a lot of time and effort so it can be beneficial to get a professional SEO team to help you with this.

These tips were brought to you by Leeds SEO Company Blueclaw.