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5 must take steps before launching your website



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5 must take steps before launching your website

If you're setting up a website, you probably know what to do if you've done it a few times already. If you have never set up a website before, there are plenty of things that you need focus on before launching, so you're not messing anything up or setting yourself behind when you just start. A website is fairly easy to launch, but it's even easier to mess up, and that's why you need to do it right from the beginning.

Some things I will be going over in this discussion may seem pretty obvious while others might not, but they all are required if you want to become successful without wasting some of your visitors time. Think about it, if you don't implement certain things right from the start, you might not be capturing emails that could have brought in loyal clients that pay a lot of money or help you bring in referral traffic. Start strong from the beginning and you'll cut out all the worries that come from starting late 5 must take steps before launching your website

Let's get to the 5 steps, shall we 5 must take steps before launching your website


Make sure your navigation is working properly
This may not sound like a biggie, but it is because you want your visitors to be able to navigate around your website extremely easy. One of the biggest reasons people leave websites is because they can't figure out the navigation, and then they get annoyed and go to your competitor's websites. Your top and bottom menus need to be linked to your main pages and categories while a section of the footer should show your most recent blog posts. Now, you'll have a blog link in the top and bottom menus, but the most recent blog posts will likely get you some traffic flowing through your website 5 must take steps before launching your website

If your navigation is convoluted, you will notice that people are leaving after 1 or 2 page views, and that's not what makes a successful website. If you aren't sure if your navigation is perfect, have some friends and family come in and review everything, if even one of the comments on how they through it was difficult to browse your pages, you need to edit something to do with your navigation and traffic flow.


Add dozens of articles to your blog
A lot of website owners don't think about adding a lot of content to their website prior to launch because they don't think it will help out too often early on. In fact, adding more content when you start off is better than if you add it after a few weeks of work. This is because you will have massive amounts of content for Google and the other search engines to scan over an index for their visitors to click through to, and they will be clicking through to your website 5 must take steps before launching your website

Content is king, and a great website will have a lot of it, which the search engines will love and boost your rankings because of it. So, add plenty of great content that people will love, and make sure your content is live before you launch.


Interlink when you can, with the right anchors
When you think of SEO and flow, you don't always think of interlinking, but you should be because it's one of the best ways for the search engine spiders to get through your website in the shortest amount of time. Interlinking with the right anchors will always please Google and the other search engines because you're essentially telling them what the page is about that they're going to. If you use the wrong anchors when interlinking, you will confuse the search engine spiders, and they might not index your website properly.

If you're blatantly using the wrong anchors to just boost your rankings for specific keywords, you'll be breaking some rules set forth by the search engines, and you might actually get a penalty because of this. If you do some interlinking, use anchors that are related to the page you're linking to, and you will be safe from a penalty 5 must take steps before launching your website


Speed up your websites loading times
Load times are something that can actually hurt your rankings and the time people actually stay on your website. Think about it, how often would you stay on a website that took 1 minute to load each page you visit? I know that when I visit a website, I tend to visit 10+ pages in a short amount of time, which means if a page takes 1 minute to load I would be on the website for 10+ minutes.

People don't have patience, so speed up your load times by reducing your images sizes, caching what you can, having a bigger hosting plan and not a shared hosting one if possible, and try not to overload your page with videos that auto play. Doing that will definitely speed up your load times and please everyone from the search engines to the visitors wanting to see what's on your pages.


Always have an email capture form for your newsletter
Before you launch, you need to be sure you have something that captures emails for your newsletters. If you don't plan on sending out newsletters, you probably shouldn't have a website set up in the first place, because this is a pretty common thing when it comes to marketing. Think about it, for every $3 spent on email marketing, you will usually profit $60. This is an amazing ROI and it's actually the best return for any marketing we have access to today 5 must take steps before launching your website

If you have all of this setup, you can actually automate it to a point where you don't actually have to worry much about sending out the emails yourself. I would highly recommend using something like MailChimp to capture and send out your emails automatically, so you don't have to worry about the work. You can actually schedule your emails to send out for a few months in advance, making your email marketing extremely simple to do 5 must take steps before launching your website


In conclusion
These 5 points are something you should always look at when you decide to launch a website. If you don't have all of these checked off of your list, you will hit some problems soon after you go live, which is something no one wants to happen. Most of the points I hit on above are fairly easy to do on your own unless you outsource the work to a freelancer making it even easier lol.


Remember to follow me!
https://www.seocheckout.com/user/TommyCarey


Thanks!

Razzy

Comments

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vinaya
I have subscribed option enabled on my blogs and websites, however, I am not sending any newsletters. I do not have a lot of subscribers, therefore, I am not doing email marketing. I have related articles option enabled on my websites and blogs, however, I am not interlinking articles through anchor texts. I should be doing this but my current focus is on publishing more contents.



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Corzhens
Testing the entirety of the website, particularly with the navigation, is imperative before launching it in the internet. It is unthinkable for a website now to have a broken link because that can damage your reputation. Some website owners I know hire testers so they can be assured that the navigation has no broken links, that you can move forward to the inner page and get back to the previous pages.



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JoeMilford
This comment could not be more true. When I first opened up a site, I did not test run everything before I posted it, and I started getting complaints and notifications (emails) from the visitors about this glitch here and that glitch there. It was pretty embarrassing, but a lesson learned, and I have not made those same mistakes again since. i am not exactly sure, nor will I ever know, how many customers or return visitors I may have lost just from making this simple mistake. The idea of using a tester is a really good one, actually.



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Martinsx1
This is very true, before putting out your new website out to visitors, it's imparative to have it tested several times on more than one occasion in order to be sure that everything is in order. This prevents getting loads of complaints from your site members once it's launched with glitches here and there.



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vinaya
Having enough well written and interesting contents is the basic requirement for any website. However, equally important is the design. The website should have a unique design. The website should be easy to navigate. You need to categorize every page and posts in your header/footer or sidebar menu so that the visitors can easily check your contents.
Yes, you should not have broken links in your website. Seeing nothing found pages will deter the user.



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CarryT
Remember, free hosting companies need to make money as well. You will get upsells and eventually, you will need to pay.

So, personally, I’m a fan of Siteground.

First of all, it’s non-EIG company, Second, it’s one of the biggest hosting companies out there - over 400,000 active customers and hosting over 1.5 million sites. That’s a lot.



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Martinsx1
".... First of all, it’s non-EIG company, Second, it’s one of the biggest hosting companies out there - over 400,000 active customers and hosting over 1.5 million sites...."

I'm well aware about Siteground and how good the hosting company is. The most interesting thing that I love about the hosting company is its security for any website that hosts using their services. One the biggest blog owner I know on Postloop makes use Siteground hosting.



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JoeMilford
I think that you make a really good point here in terms of the navigability of the website. I know that websites which are confusing and convoluted totally turn me off, and I will generally click off of them almost immediately, so I would not want to do that to the visitors to my own sites. I have always been a fan of minimalism, and I am sure I have mentioned this to you before over the last few months in responding to your forums, and I think that really is the way to go. We should make it as easy as possible for our traffic and clients to access and enjoy all of the aspects of our sites. Life is complicated enough without giving people even more headaches, right?



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vinaya
I have learned from the mistakes. I once launched a user-generated article site without testing. I received a lot of complains from the users that they were not able to post articles. There was a glitch with posting. I had to abort the idea of launching this site.
Another thing you need to consider is have a user-friendly design. The look of the website is very important because the first impression counts.



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Martinsx1
Nice article, you discussed exactly the points I looked forward to seeing being explained in the content. Taking a good look in how the site navigation is set would help the visitors to find their way easily being on the site. If someone finds it extremely difficult to move about in a site, I seriously doubt such person would be on such site for long. Having a good high quality content available in the site and ensuring increased speed of connection is one way to get the best out of your site.



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Judas2018
Coding and proper coding is very important before launching a website. Make sure it looks like YOU want it to look. No matter how long it takes. Also give yourself time to revisit the site from time to time. If there's anything you liked last week, that you don't like this week, get rid of it and make changes. Once you've settled on every aspect, nook and cranny of your website... along with getting any and all bugs ironed or smoothed out, then and only then is when you should launch.



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JoeMilford
Judas2018,
I like this post of yours and it reminds me of the saying and old cliche that, "Rome wasn't built in a day". It does take constant finessing and editing, at times, to get our online presence exactly the way we want it to be. Plus, hopefully we are all always evolving and improving, so, if we are, then obviously we will want to change things as we learn as we go. I think it is important to provide your audience and traffic with consistency, but I am sure that anyone who frequents our sites or blogs will only appreciate obvious improvements which we make over time.



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Judas2018
I prefer to create a version of my site that I am happy with, and don't need to rework on the fly. Visitors love consistency, and the last thing they want while browsing a site is for there to be 'men at work.' It's like having people work on your car while you're driving it. I believe a site should be repaired, rebuilt or overhauled 100% in full. Before any launch happens. You can be doing mild code clean up while visitors are at your site but that's behind the scenes stuff that doesn't interfere with user experience in any way.



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cmoneyspinner
RE: Interlink when you can, with the right anchors

I'm not sure I know enough about this and whether or not I've been doing it the right way. Glad you mentioned it because now I know what I need to research.

RE: Always have an email capture form for your newsletter

I have started using a service offered by Sumo. A pop-up appears as soon as a visitor lands at my blog with the offer to subscribe to the newsletter. It works well.



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vinaya
Adding 2-3 links from anchor not only helps to generate more traffic (a visitor who is reading your article might also check the anchor text link and read that article as well). Interlinking is also one of the on page seo strategies. This helps your search engine ranking.
They say email marketing generates 6-7 percet sales. In other words, if you send emails to 100 people 6-7 individuals might buy products. This is not bad considering the fact that it is not difficult to send emails if you already have a list.



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cmoneyspinner
OK! That's clear. Thanks. I understand now. 5 must take steps before launching your website



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DenisP
Poor navigation on websites is probably the number one factor which results in me leaving a site. I want to be able to easily find my way to content that interests me, and if you don't make that easy to do, I'll be quick to return to my Google search page in hopes of finding a better site.

I intend on launching a site soon, but while I'm learning the ins and outs of running a site, I've been gathering ideas for content and writing out posts ahead of time. While I thought this may be a waste of time, it seems that I've had the right idea so far.



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centurion
Thanks for the beautiful techniques about website launch. I shall follow must the techniques. Navigation of pages and sub pages are every much important. if any one found any page is not working properly than there have no chance to return of that visitor. High volume based keyword and article will generate high volume of traffic for your website for the life time. In case of white hat SEO- 85% traffic generate from search engine by specific keyword and right keyword choice.

Thanks
Centurion



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DarthHazard
The loading times of your website are one of the most important aspects and definitely something you should be focusing on before the launch of your website. If your site does not load fast or is extremely slow to navigate through then users will just close your site and not bother to revisit. You could be losing out on a lot of potential users/customers by having a slow loading website.



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kgord
I think these are all important steps to take and important things to do. I think we need to look at it as steps that are essential to take when we have websites. They will help us to make money which is something that we are all after I imagine.



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Martinsx1
Ever since I started working as a freelancer, I have come to learn a few things about starting up a website and all the tips discussed in this article are very essential to getting your website work perfectly to have lots visitors that would give the site a good reputation and more success for the site owner.



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kgord
Yes, I think there are certain steps athat are fairly standard for any website owner to take. It is just one of the great things to find and use when you are looking for ways to jumpstart and improve on your site.



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vhinz
Having an email capture/optin paged is really important to get connected with your site's visitors. With their emails on your list, you have a way of notifying them once you posted new content. And before launching your website, it is also important that you have already prepared series of newsletters that you can schedule for sending to your subscribers after they signed up. With prepared and properly planned out newsletters for a month or months, you can be sure that you'll fulfill your promise of sending updates to your subscribers.



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treecko142
Some people get too excited to launch their website that they forget to double check and look for things to improve. Once you release your site and some people visit it, the problems would eventually surface and some people will have a bad impression of the website and not return again. It is best to have almost everything right in terms of functionality and design on the first launch for a better result.



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overcast
I don't kind of relate to 1$ to 40 dollar earning ratio. You can see that some of the time earning that much may not lead to generous earning. And it can lead to even more issues with the same as well. I know one thing for sure that email marketing is over rated. Not every blog and the website can make money through it. If this were to be that easy,everyone would be making money from it.



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Corzhens
I have some apprehensions with email marketing because I don’t think it is that effective anymore especially when the subscriber is not really interested but only subscribed due to another reason. Another issue with email marketing is the kind of spiel that you will send out to attract the reader. I am speaking from my experience that I don’t normally read emails that I have subscribed to but only when I have extra time.



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overcast
Yes in past people used to be serious about the subscription. But now that people are spamming with email marketing. So it's harder to get new customers. And that makes the website traffic driving harder with emails. I have found out that launching website with the email newsletter can be a good start.



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Jeane
I've noticed that on some newly launched blogs make it quite difficult to subscribe to their rss feeds.

Since there are some people who may visit your site once and might be interested in reading what you post but don't want to visit your site every day to find out if you've posted something new, they'll prefer to subscribe to your rss feed.

When you launch your blog make sure you make it easy for everyone to subscribe to your rss feeds or some other way to have new content delivered to them. This ensures that you don't lose anyone who may eventually get to be your regular blog visitors.



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