At last, you’ve finally went live with your website. The only thing that really matters now is to create content and market the hell out of it, right? Well, start pumping your brakes. You have to go through another checklist of things to do before your site is actually ready for the masses.

I highly recommend you go through the steps listed below to help you bring about the best possible experience for your visitors (and if it’s possible, take care it them before you’re even online).

Get Crawled & Indexed

What the heck does that mean anyway? This is mandatory if you want your site to rank high with search engines and several other web services out there. This is only a fraction of the stuff you have to do to improve the overall usability of your site.

Sitemap.xml is a file for listing all the URLS that are included within your site. It lets web crawlers like Googlebot understand what your site is all about.

If you’ve taken the Wordpress route, you’re in good shape: The simple thing to do is to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, and let it do all the work for you. This is wonderful plugin, and one of many I use on my own site.

Do you hate Wordpress with an undying passion? Click on over to this site, which is a neat tool that creates your own xml for you after submitting your URL for analysis.

Robots.txt is another important file that search engines gobble up like the Cookie Monster on a cookie binge. It’s just a text file that contains information describing which parts of your site are all right with being crawled.

If you want to create your own file, just grab a template and change it to work with your own site.
Remember there are two simple rules you must follow when it comes to tinkering with a robots.txt file:

1. You don’t want search engine crawlers to read duplicate content on your site.
2. You don’t want search engine crawlers to read personal information and scripts (e.g. wp-admin files in Wordpress)

Use Google Analytics

Knowing as much as you can about your site’s traffic is invaluable. Without your stats, you won’t have a clue about the people who visit your site and it’ll be an uphill battle trying to bring in more traffic.

If you only want the best and 100% free applications that extensively show the data about your site’s visitors, then head on over to Google Analytics.

Sure, there are several other alternatives out there, but Google Analytics is the current titleholder, and not because of Google’s backing, but because it’s so damn powerful and easy to use.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

I know many people don’t really use this tool, -- it doesn’t have as much fame as Google Analytics, for example – on the other hand, it still one of the craftiest tools to have at your disposal.
Here are a few tricks Google Webmaster Tools will have for your site:

• What went wrong when Googlebot tried to index your site
• How many links are pointing to other sites (inbound/outbound links)
• Dominant keywords that are on your site
• Warnings about possible security threats that might have been uploaded to your site

Would you like to know more about Google Webmaster Tools? Don’t be surprised that the best way to go about learning how to it is right from Google’s Webmaster Tools Help section.

Track Your Rankings

High ranking in any search engine is pretty damn important if you ask me. First page ranking means more traffic and your foot in the door of the people’s mind. More traffic = more dinero That’s why people focus so much on whether or not their SEO tactics are actually working.

If you don’t have the funds to buy apps right now there are several ways to go about tracking your keyword usage:

Type in a specific keyword that’s related to your site and look at how high you rank. You should never click your own links. Why? Google will log it and next time you’ll see your site in a lower position. On the other hand, you’re the only one who really knows what has changed, the rest will see it as the standard position. This happens because Google likes to guess what you’re likely to do and, thus, same pages show up again and again.

Even though there are countless browser add-ons help you with your keyword usage. I personally favor the one everybody calls Rank Checker.



It’s so damn easy to use and it even has all the rich features for search engine analysis and monitoring.

Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is heavenly. Let’s assume you’re interested in everything that’s related to the term, detailedreams. If I’m spot on, then you probably want to see what other websites are writing about it.
On the other hand, you can’t track the whole internet (it’s a vast universe). Now this is where Google Alerts comes in handy. Google Alerts give you a heads up about every new site that includes keywords you’re interested in. This lets you peek in on the competition, as well as grasping a better understanding of what people are saying about your site.

A smart move is to monitor your site’s name, any abbreviations of it, URL, and several other stuff that are related to you.

Monitor Your Website

No doubt about it, knowing your uptime stats is probably the best thing you can do to maintain the overall integrity of your site. The thing is that you can’t visit your site every single second throughout the day. Fortunately, there’s a really neat site that takes care of that for you. Thanks to Pingdom, you can track all of your sites simultaneously, and if one goes down, you’ll be notified by email. The best thing about it? It’s totally free.

Test Your Speed

It felt like only yesterday when Google said it would factor in site speed when determining search engine ranking. Obviously pleasing Google isn’t the only reason why you have to speed up your site. People hate waiting, and you only have seconds before they click on the next link if they feel your site as being super slow.

There are several tools out there to help you make your site experience a quick process. One terrific tool I recommend is YSlow: it takes a look at your site and suggests tips to make your site as speedy as it can be.

Conclusion

Taking care of all the stuff I talked about out above should take about 30 minutes (probably sooner if you have a strong technical background). This hour will pay off immense dividends as you place your site on a long-term and stable platform to work off of.