Overview

Setting up an effective website for your business has grown from an optional gimmick to almost a complete necessity over the course of the past decade. Besides needing to look at the long term, you also have to look at the short term. Ask yourself this question: Is your website prepared to be the best it can be in terms of SEO, at launch?

Almost every single entrepreneur, business owner, or hobbyist will answer no if they’re being truthful. The world of SEO changes on a nearly daily basis and there are dozens of different things you have to investigate and ensure fits into the standards that keep you on the good boy list with Google and other search engines.

Luckily, there are a few things – okay, maybe more than a few – that are bets you can count on. The following checklist will go over the various tasks you absolutely must fulfill if you hope to have the best website launch you can possibly muster, and it’s been conveniently categorized so you can keep track.

The Basics

• Check your website’s spelling and grammar.
  

  This is straight forward and universal for all languages, but especially true for English. Customers are often put off by visiting a company’s page only to see it stuffed aimlessly with keywords and writing that was clearly not written by a native speaker. If you’re providing a service or product to a certain language, ensure that your presentation is top-notch. 

• Fix any broken links on your website.
  

  You can check this manually or use a free tool on the internet, but whichever way you decide on leads to the same result: you have to fix broken links. Not only do the search engines check each link for indexing your website, but your visitors will also be clicking around. Make sure they actually lead somewhere.

• Add Google Analytics to your website.
  

  The leading service provider in studying your site metrics, Google Analytics is a must-have for any company that hopes to maximize their exposure and discover where they’re lacking.

Usability & Accessibility

• Test your website’s load speed.
  

  Google (you’ll be hearing this name a lot) has a developer service available to everyone that lets you test the load speed of any website. By using Google PageSpeed, you can discover what is making your website take ages to load as well as various ways of fixing that very problem. 

• Test your website’s functionality across all browsers.
  
  Unfortunately, there are many websites live today that only function on certain browsers or have limited functionality. You can test each browser individually yourself or you can utilize a service such as BrowserStack
  
  
• Create and upload a universal favicon
  

  Long ago, you could upload a simple favicon.ico and call it a day. This isn’t possible anymore, with there being several different ways of displaying a favicon across various browsers. Having only a favicon.ico can cause users to see a big blank where your icon should be. Don’t do this by yourself; there are free services out there that can generate the favicons you need automatically, such as RealFaviconGenerator.net. 

• Add a “search” function to your website.
  

  If you plan on having a lot of information or a blog on your website, you can utilize Google Custom Search Engine to help users find what they’re looking for easily with a few words in a form. Basic functionality is free and has better utilization than default search bars in Wordpress, Squarespace, and other platforms. 

• Add a custom 404 error page to improve functionality.
  

  We’ve all seen the dreaded 404 page. Most of the time, they’re completely useless to both the user and the webmaster. It is, however, possible to add a custom 404 page that can not only make the user’s life easier, but also yours. Perl scripts are your friend here, but keep in mind that this may not be an option on certain server setups. 

Social Media

• Set up a Twitter account.
• Set up a LinkedIn profile.
• Set up a Facebook page.
• Set up a Google+ profile.
• Set up a few Pinterest boards.
  

  If your business is DIY, arts, photography, food, or construction oriented, Pinterest can not only be an amazing way to expose your work but to develop a niche following at the same time. You can set up a business account that links back to your company’s website, ensuring that anyone who shares your work is also sharing your company. 

• Set up an Instagram account.
  

  Much like with Pinterest, Instagram can be a great way to appeal to your niche. Have a service or product that does well in the limelight? This website can be an awesome way to show it off and interact with customers. Be wary to not use Instagram as a billboard, but instead a way of showing your fans the “behind the scenes” of your company.  

• Claim your business on Foursquare’s website.
  

  This one might sound the same as doing your business citations, but Foursquare has more of a social media spin on the idea. You can offer specials to your customers, provide tips to any potential visitor, and even use analytics to study your business’ demographic. 

• Claim your business on Google My Business.
• Claim your business on Bing Places for Business.
• Claim your business on Yahoo Local.
• Claim your business on Yelp for Business Owners.
  

  Note on the previous five: These are all specialized ways to ultimately do something very similar to citations. Don’t neglect either! 

• Occupy your brand on all social media oriented websites, regardless of use.
  

  It happens to hundreds of businesses around the world. You start a company, get involved on a couple websites, develop a following, and suddenly discover that your brand name is now being used on other websites to either parody your business, slander it, or it’s simply someone unsuspecting who really liked the name. Make sure to own your brand name on as many websites as you can find and log their account info somewhere safe. This will also help your standing in the search results!

• Place relevant social media links on your website.
  

  The recommended way of doing this is to place them as icons. Customers and visitors will recognize the brand and click through. It’s important to remember that traffic from your website can bolster your social media profiles which in turn help your website. It’s a repetitive cycle, one that you shouldn’t neglect. 

• Add Twitter Card support.
  

  Twitter has a nifty service called Twitter Cards. By adding a few lines of code to your website, users who link to your content will automatically append additional media (such as photos or videos) to their tweet that wouldn’t normally be there. They even have analytics so you can track their usefulness. 

• Add Facebook Insights support.
  

  Although your Facebook page is separate from your website, Facebook has a built-in service called Insights that lets you see how users on their website are interacting with your page and, helpfully, how this corresponds with your website itself. You can easily check how many users are clicking through to your website from your Facebook page.

• Add Structured Data Markup support. 
  

  This is Google’s approach to enhancing your experience with social media and searching around the web. This works similarly to Twitter Card, only it exists across all of Google’s services such as their basic web search, Google Maps, Google Now, and even their OK Google competitor to Apple’s Siri. 

Mobile 

• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
  

  Google has a nifty little tool that quickly checks whether or not your website has a mobile-friendly design. It’s a relatively new change they’ve implemented and they provide webmasters all the info they need to make an educated decision on the mobile status of their site. 

• After using the above tool, check if your website is deemed mobile-friendly by Google when searching on a mobile device.

  Doing well with the Mobile-Friendly Test doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll have the new “mobile-friendly label” that Google has rolled out. Websites that are considered mobile-friendly do better in search results and receive preferential treatment from the search engine when users are on a mobile device. 

Conclusion

What can you take away from this checklist? 

One: that there are a lot of little details when it comes to optimizing the launch of your website. This doesn’t even take into account the work that goes into long-term SEO management of your domain.

Two: that these same little details aren’t incredibly tough to get to, just time-consuming and requiring of some technical know-how.

And finally three: that there are plenty of resources available around the internet that can not only help you get through this checklist by yourself, but also plenty of services available that can do it for you.

Dealing with SEO set-up and management can be tough and a huge portion of your time. There’s no shame in not wanting to do it yourself, especially when you have a business or personal endeavour to pursue. That being said, these things are regularly not optional.

They have to be done. SEIRIM has expertise in this very industry and we possess a superb portfolio in all things SEO. Give us a shout and we can discuss your needs at an affordable rate. Our practices use the latest standards, guaranteeing you a top tier level of quality. Check out our SEO work [here (link to portfolio)].

Think anything’s missing or wrong? Feel free to contact us at [email]!