I was recently asked for a checklist of essential items to check on a website before it launched. So I have shared it with you all here:
Page titles
You should know by now that every page must have a page title. It's what appears in the top of the browser for that page and how it gets shown by default as a bookmark or Social Media post.
However it is also a key Search Engine Optimisation ranking factor, so ensure that it is relevant, the right length (approx 55 characters including spaces seems to be fine) and ideally unique across your new site. There is also a significant consensus in the SEO community that the keyword you are targeting for this page should be as close to the beginning of this title as possible.... but I will leave that for you to assess the value of.
Also since Google usually displays just the first 50–60 characters of a title tag, I would keep to that range without very good reason.
Meta data / Meta tags
These have grown in the number and function they perform over time, with some having a bearing on Social channels and SEO. But the key one here is Meta Description.
I'm not going to give you advice about what to exactly write in this field... as I've covered it in so many other blog posts. However, ensure that have a description on every page (correctly placed inside the <head> of the page). Plus consider that the current average length of the description field for desktop results is around 160 characters, whereas an average of 130 characters for mobile seems to be the best.
Note: Ignore using Meta Keyword tags
Sitemap
This little text file (mostly named sitemap.xml) usually sits in the root directory (or obvious sub-directory) of your site. It is a tried & tested way to tell search engines which pages are available for them to be crawled. It does this by giving a list of URLs for every public page in the site along with extra metadata about them.
Robots.txt
This little text file (all lower-case only please) should sit in your root directory of your site. It is usually the first file a search engine bot checks on a site and is there to tell all or individual bots what they are NOT supposed to do. For example, they are supposed to ignore certain directories or files.
So in this way it is the opposite of a sitemap.xml file and care should be taken to not have pages in both.
Note: some search engines may ignore the robots.txt so do not use this as a way to hide site content or data you definitely don't want found.
Redirects
When launching a new site, URLs can change.
At the most fundamental level, this can mean a change of domain (e.g. brandx.com to brand y.com) or a change of sub-domain (e.g. blog.brand.com to brand.com/blog). So sites should ensure they understand and handle all redirects correctly at new site launch.
Page titles
You should know by now that every page must have a page title. It's what appears in the top of the browser for that page and how it gets shown by default as a bookmark or Social Media post.
However it is also a key Search Engine Optimisation ranking factor, so ensure that it is relevant, the right length (approx 55 characters including spaces seems to be fine) and ideally unique across your new site. There is also a significant consensus in the SEO community that the keyword you are targeting for this page should be as close to the beginning of this title as possible.... but I will leave that for you to assess the value of.
Also since Google usually displays just the first 50–60 characters of a title tag, I would keep to that range without very good reason.
Meta data / Meta tags
These have grown in the number and function they perform over time, with some having a bearing on Social channels and SEO. But the key one here is Meta Description.
I'm not going to give you advice about what to exactly write in this field... as I've covered it in so many other blog posts. However, ensure that have a description on every page (correctly placed inside the <head> of the page). Plus consider that the current average length of the description field for desktop results is around 160 characters, whereas an average of 130 characters for mobile seems to be the best.
Note: Ignore using Meta Keyword tags
Sitemap
This little text file (mostly named sitemap.xml) usually sits in the root directory (or obvious sub-directory) of your site. It is a tried & tested way to tell search engines which pages are available for them to be crawled. It does this by giving a list of URLs for every public page in the site along with extra metadata about them.
Robots.txt
This little text file (all lower-case only please) should sit in your root directory of your site. It is usually the first file a search engine bot checks on a site and is there to tell all or individual bots what they are NOT supposed to do. For example, they are supposed to ignore certain directories or files.
So in this way it is the opposite of a sitemap.xml file and care should be taken to not have pages in both.
Note: some search engines may ignore the robots.txt so do not use this as a way to hide site content or data you definitely don't want found.
Redirects
When launching a new site, URLs can change.
At the most fundamental level, this can mean a change of domain (e.g. brandx.com to brand y.com) or a change of sub-domain (e.g. blog.brand.com to brand.com/blog). So sites should ensure they understand and handle all redirects correctly at new site launch.
