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To get the most out of a website, it is essential to be effective and that all important aspects of the website design are applied correctly. For example, the website should be easy to navigate, preferably with the 3-click rule, have an aesthetic appeal and provide a clear message to your visitors. The following is a list of points you should consider before creating and launching your website in the online world.
1 – Create Favicon
The symbol of your website favicon in the browser window or tab helps visitors to identify the pages of your website. It is simply a file of 16×16 pixels in GIF format and should be renamed as favicon.ico.
2 – Test All Forms
Generally, we tend to forget to try the contact forms of our website while we take care of design and development. You must ensure you have all important fields such as name, email, phone number, etc.
3 – Titles and Meta Tags
Titles are very important for SEO positioning, facing search engines robots and also for visitors, as they refer the content of the page they are visiting, to ensure each and every page of your site has an adequate and appropriate title.Meta tags have a somewhat lesser importance in the SEO positioning for search engines, but it is always good to include them because it provides more information to search engines about the page.
4 – Navigation
To ensure easy navigation, ensure the most important site links are easy to find. You can also have an accessory with a sidebar menu to accommodate the links of sub-categories of the main links or a core tablet with direct links to content that you want to highlight. Do not forget to repeat the navigation in the footer to make it easier for visitors to find the content they are looking for on your website, preferably in text-only mode for those browsers that have JavaScript disabled mode.
5 – Search Engine Friendly URLs
Search Engine Friendly URLs represent an advantage of SEO positioning in the search engines and ensure assistance in gaining quicker rankings.
6 – Install Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers extensive information about your website and, most importantly, the behavior of visitors on it. With the service of Google Analytics, you can monitor the progress of your website in real-time and study how really the changes really affect you make.
7 – Register Your Website in Google Webmaster
Google Webmaster Tool will help you manage your website, so ensure you have checked the robots.txt file and .htaccess so that search engines can crawl your site. You must also submit the sitemap to webmaster tools to facilitate traceability.
8 – Robots Exclusion Protocol: Robots.txt
With the robots exclusion protocol what is sought is to prevent certain folders on your website to get indexed by search engine robots. It is very useful when it comes to ‘hide’ certain information within the directory structure of your website for the search engines.
9 – Sitemaps
A sitemap lists the pages of your website, along with some additional information such as how often the page changes its contents, when was the last update and how important are some other pages of the same site. You must generate a sitemap and register it in Google Webmaster Tool. It is a fundamental part, among others, for effective SEO.
10 – Check All Links on Site
Always ensure that all links on the site are working and are directed to the designated page. You can check all the links on your site with W3C Link Checker.
11 – Validation
The website should aim to achieve 100% W3C validation. The tool W3C Validator helps you validate the site and will indicate those parts of HTML codes, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, CSS that do not meet the validation criteria.
12 – Consistency in Design
The website should be consistent in its design and this must necessarily provide visitors navigating the site. With the latest Google algorithm update, this point has become more important in the way of getting a good SEO positioning.
13 – Set Redirect 301 & 302
In case your website is a new version of an older one, and that its structure has changed, you must have the inventory of your old site before removing the server. Mapping URLs presents the URL of the previous site is very important. Your site must have the right kind of redirects 301 or 302. In the Google webmaster tools, you can check which pages to include in the trace 404 so you can redirect them to the correct pages.
14 – Configure Page 404
To avoid broken links, you should set up a proper 404 page and offer additional links to other relevant pages to navigate on 404 page.
15 – RSS Feed
If you have a blog on your website, do not forget to provide a link to the RSS feed. This will help people register to receive updates and stay connected to your site.
16 – Disable JavaScript
You must ensure your website is functional even with JavaScript disabled. Many visitors have JavaScript disabled functions for security reasons. In particular, check if the contact forms are fully operational with JavaScript functions disabled. There are many add-ons for browsers that allow this function.
17 – Social Media
The most effective way to publicize the content of your website is that it possesses links to share content on social networks. Both for popular CMS, designed as HTML websites, there are easy insertion components that will save much time, because they are very easy to use.
18 – Compatibility between Browsers
You must test your site across multiple browsers to ensure aesthetics and functionality are similar in the most popular browsers.
19 – Website Loading Speed
Last but not least, once this process takes place, you must verify the loading speed of the website.This depends on many factors starting with web hosting (shared, virtual, dedicated, etc.), the platform on which it is created, graphics, flash animation, banners, compression of CSS and the way it is drafted with the code.Optimization of loading speed of your website is extremely important in SEO positioning.
20 – Revise, Correct, Re-revise and Re-correct Content
Despite of having corrected your content, revise it one more time before making it live. You must correct spelling for at least 2 more times usually recommended. Split large paragraphs into small paragraphs and insert some graphics because too much text makes readers bored.
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About the Author
David Park is a professional digital media marketer with a dynamic personality and skills. Creative designing and writing are his passions and he enjoys being an active part of the online world. At present, he is managing all the creative works for One Logo Design You can follow him on Twitter
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