Points That You Can’t Afford Missing Before and After Launching A Website
You probably are happy after giving the final touch to your website. The site looks perfect, icons are catchy, the call to action is appealing and the copy is engaging. It’s just one thing missing – the SEO! When you’re so close to finishing your web design project, you shouldn’t risk assessing the SEO situation.
With SEO there are a lot of things you can do- before and after your site goes live. Check these points out to maximize your website’s SEO and meet the search engine’s huge expectations:
Points You Should Consider Before Going Live
Research Keywords and Optimize Everything Around Them: Optimizing keywords is the significant aspect of SEO and PPC. If you haven’t chosen and used keywords your customers are searching for, your site will not get found easily.
Check for Optimized Meta Tags: Though meta tags are only used for search engines, they’re an essential part of Google’s core algorithm and can’t be ignored! Take a great care of the title tags, meta descriptions, alt texts, and all the necessary things.
Check for Optimized Content and Headers: As we all know, content is the king so optimizing it with rightful keywords and important headers is something that you can’t miss. So, go ahead and optimize your content and headers accordingly. And do not forget to keep only a single tag on your page.
Check for Optimized Images: Do take care of optimizing your images for the web as it can save or compile your image in a web-friendly format.
Domain Check: It’s a sure thing that you’ve purchased a domain already as you’re about to launch your website. But you must always give a cursory glance to your domain’s history. It can save you from dealing with a domain that has a negative history associated in a long run. In this regard tools like Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or WHOIS Search can come handy to you.
Host Check: Yes, we know that this step is already done, but it still needs a little attention there! Don’t forget that an unreliable web host whose server goes down often will end up comprising your site’s availability and could affect your site’s SEO.
Things you Should Check After Going Live:
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS: Google considers HTTPS version more prominent. So, make sure that you’re taking care of it while launching your website.
Beware of Robot txt: Make sure that you have checked that robot txt is on allow mode otherwise the search engine could not crawl it or find it.
Check No-Index Snippet: Don’t forget to check no-index snippet, if you haven’t then the probability is Googlebot will immediately skip your page from indexing it.
Check Html and XML Sitemap: Make sure that Html and XML sitemap is created to ensure that Google can find your pages and you cater to the users as well. Since XML is helpful for the search engine to find the site and Html is helpful for the user to react to it.
Finding and Fixing Page Issues, if any: It’s of utmost importance that you have found and fixed if there are any page issues, especially errors like “404” since it can directly influence the position in the search results negatively.
Place Google Analytics “UA” code: If you haven’t already inserted it, do create a property in google analytics. This would help you track the performance of the website traffic.
Insert Google Search Console Code: Inserting google search console code will allow webmasters to check your site’s indexing status and optimize visibility of your website. Webmaster allows you to monitor and fix the crawl, indexing, fetching and other issues with your website. You can also do data structuring, sitemap.xml and robots.txt submitting from there.
Page Load Time for Desktop & Mobile: Always keep a check on your website’s page load time and fix that otherwise it will drastically affect the traffic of your site.
To Sum Up
These points might seem very tiny but not to mention taking care of these small loopholes before and after the launch of your website can make you an SEO beast. After all, beating the Search Engine needs a smart brain, the SEO technicalities, and a keen eye. Leaving even a tiny gap in your SEO planning can cause great harm to your website’s ranking! And, launching your website is the most significant part of your project so there’s a little scope of leaving these points behind.
