Your awesome site is completed on the development server and you’re ready to go live. Well its time to think about having the search engines index and rank your site. I will give you some of the quality guidelines, recommended by google.

How to start?

The first thing once your new site is live is to go to http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/ and follow the instructions on submitting your URL.

Help Google find your pages.

– Make sure google can find all your pages by links from other “findable” pages.
– Submit a sitemap.
– Make sure your robots.txt file is up to date and your pages are getting the coverage.
– Ensure that other sites that should know about your site knows that your site is online now.
– Create content that clearly describes what your business is about.
– Think like a user of your site and imagine what they would type to find your type of business and include those words in your content.
– The “title” and “alt” elements should be accurate, descriptive and specific about the page.
– If you are using a content management system like wordpress or joomla make sure the pages and links you create are accessible by the Search Engines.
– Allow public pages on your site to be crawled without session ids and url params.
– Your site’s important content should be readily visible to your visitor as more importance will be given to that according to google. The crawler can read html hidden in accordion tabs but it is given less importance.
– Advertisement links on the page should not be followed by a crawler. You can do this in the robots.txt file.
– Use valid html on live web pages.
– Optimize your web pages for fast loading times. Prepare images for web pages and mobile beforehand.
– Use responsive design techniques. Your site should look good on all types of devices.
– If possible you should use SSL to secure your site’s connection. According to google secure sites will rank higher.
– Make sure the site appears correctly on the different browsers, as different browsers render things differently.
These are some of the quality guidelines for setting up your site for higher rankings as defined by Google.
“Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.” – Google

There is a lot of advanced techniques involved in building a professional business website that is beyond the capabilities of a casual web “dabbler”. If you’ve invested in your physical store do not shortchange your online presence by having a sub-standard website.
Google also provides us with things to avoid when trying to rank your site. I will post those also later.

Contact us for professional results.

Crystal Studios Web Design is a full service web development and Internet Marketing service. Crystal Studios Web Design is a local web developer / local web development company based in Westfield NJ. We do local web development in Cranford NJ, web development in Clark NJ, web development in Garwood NJ, web development in Scotch Plains NJ, web development in Fanwood NJ, web development in New York City and anywhere in the world really.