Do these 5 things before submitting your site to search engines

Your new website is done! Your hard work of editing, proofreading and usability studies is about to pay off. Your business website is ready to be shown to the world and submit to a zillion search engines. However, before you make that final submission, here are five tasks you should do first.

1. Add Meta Tags Titles, Meta Tag Keywords and Meta Descriptions to All Your Pages.

When you submit to search engines your site will get indexed, cataloged, and ranked mostly based on software that is looking for a few key elements. If you have an HTML site, you need to add the “Meta Tags” into your index Head record. However don’t stop there, add them into each and every page you have on your site. Keep in mind that different indexing may and should be specific to your sub-pages. In WordPress, use a high SEO theme like Thesis Theme (one of our favorites) or use the All in One SEO Pack plugin of the Yoast SEO Plugin.

2. Delete All Unused Pages.

When you create a new website or revise an old one, you have a tendency to leave unlinked old sub-pages. When you search engines index through your site, these lost pages will count against you. If you don’t want to delete old pages because of previous indexing, re-direct them–but DO get rid of them.

3. Have a Good 404 Page.

Web developers and most websites, sad to say, don’t have a good 404 page. You might be telling yourself, “All my navigation work, so why bother.” Bloggers, search engines, and friends don’t always type your links correctly. “Say it isn’t so!” Trust me, you would rather have them land on a 404 inside your website, than a misdirect page back to your host provider. For examples of good and creative 404 pages, read this…

4. Pre-Write your Meta Description.

You painfully look at every word written on your website, yet I see business owners bloggers writing their meta descriptions on the fly. That paragraph is going to be pushed to 100s of search engines, consider it as important as your marriage vows.

5. Check your Site in All Browsers.

So many developers only check sites in one or two browsers. Unfortunately, not all browser view pages the same. You need to check and make sure your site works and displays correctly. I recommend http://www.browsershots.org as it will test and show your site on nearly 100 different browsers.

Bonus Tip: Consider your focus keyword or your focus phrase for each page or blog post. This will help you focus on things such as keyword density and general focus on the page. It is easy to start off writing a website page or a blog post with a topic in mind and then stray. Having a keyword in front of you will keep you focused.

Valuable web terms and definitions:

What is a focus keyword? Think of the focus keyword as the topic of your page or post. A good post doesn’t have multiple topics, it explores one topic. If you enter a focus keyword, the Page Analysis functionality will use that as input for its analysis of your post. It can only do this for one focus keyword at a time. Source: Yoast

What is a meta title? Essentially, a meta title is the blue underline phrase that people see on the search engines. It is the section in the red box below.

Note: Your meta title does not have to be the same as your page title. For example, on the site “About Us” may make a lot of sense but it is not of value on a search engine. On the search engine something like “Learn more about the I Teach Blogging Gal.” What is a 404 page? This is the page that people land on if they mistype the url or a link is bad. For example, my 404 page is directed to my blog home page. Generally speaking a 404 page is of no real value and looks like the image below.

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