Well, congratulations on your new site and welcome to the world of online marketing and trying to get your site rising up the rankings and getting visitors that are going to convert into sales or enquiries. Having a website made is the easy bit, you are now going to need to drive people to that site and make sure your site keeps progressing in the search engines to get more and more traffic.
A big ranking factor for Google and the other major search engines is often age and how long the website has been live. Obviously, because your website is new, you are going to have to ignore this factor for the mean time, but in the long run having a regularly updated website is only going to do you massive favours.
Many people assume that once your website goes live, your work has ended but as we mentioned in the opening paragraph, the hard work has only just begun.
One of the first things you need to do is get your site into the search engines, something that is called indexing. A few years ago you would have been waiting months to get your site into Google, but luckily it is much easier these days and all you need to do is let Google know that your site is now live and is ready for them to send their spiders to your site.
The first three things you need to do are:
- Update Your Robots.txt File
- Add A Google Webmasters Account And Sitemap
- Release A Press Release
By updating your Robots.txt file you will be basically allowing the spiders access onto your website, because when your website is being developed it is quite possible that your developers blocked access to stop the spider getting early access to the site before its finished.
You then need to register a Google Webmasters (and indeed a Yahoo and Bing) account to let the engine know that not only is your site live, but that you are actually really serious about making it work. Run a sitemap.xml and then submit this in your webmasters account, which can help the engine work out a decent order of spidering and then hopefully indexing your site.
The final thing that we think you need to do just after launch is release a press release to a paid press release provider online. We recommend you do this because press releases are often published instantly and therefore you can get a link into the search engines so that they can follow it back to your site quickly.
Once you have done these three things then you should then start considering all the other things you need to do, which mainly focus around link building and online marketing. But, the three things we mention are the first few things that you need to do to help get into the search engines and start getting the early doors traffic for your website.