You have just paid a web designer for a sparkly new website so now you can take a break and expect the enquiries to come flooding in. Unfortunately unless you are a targeting an incredibly niche market, this is rarely the case.

A new website competes with other sites that have been around for years, potentially decades but there are a few things that you can do to make sure you end up higher in the listings, make sure Google lists you in their index as soon as possible and you end up with a search engine friendly website…

General

Here are some general tips to help track your website and enable your site to be listed quicker in the main search engines.

– Install Google Analytics or AWStats (which comes as standard with all hosting from TJ Design)
– Add your website to Google Webmaster Tools
– Link Google Analytics with Google Webmaster Tools
– Create a robots.txt file and upload it to the root directory of your site (go to www.yourwebsite.co.uk/robots.txt to check if you have one).
– Create a sitemap.xml file submit this to Google Webmaster Tool (go to www.yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml to check if you have one).

Link building

Many of the leading search engines count the amount and quality of your inbound links as a major factor so here are some tips.

– Create a ‘related links’ page on your website so you can link to reputable sites and even more importantly they link back to you. (think suppliers, local business directories, partners, industry associations not competitors)
– Add a Google My Business page
– Use Moz’s Open Site Explorer, and add your main competitors websites, view their “Inbound Links” from “Only External” sources to see their related links. Contact any reputable companies and request the opportunity to exchange links.
– Over time, the search engines will crawl your site and add you to their listing but you may be able to speed this process up by manually entering the URL for your site at these popular search engines..

• Google
• Bing
• Yahoo
• Open Directory Project

Don’t use any automated submission programs to submit your site to multiple search engines at one time. This can be considered as spam and you could be removed completely.

– Spend as much time as possible adding your new website to business directories and use their features like reviews to make your profile really stand out. Here are some that I would recommend…

• Cylex UK
• FreeIndex
• Thomson Local
• Yell
• Business Line Directory
• UK Small Business Directory
• Touch Local
• Scoot

– Add your website link to your business cards, flyers, stationery, emails, forum signature and any social media platforms.

Summary

The above recommendations will give your new website a real kick-start to being found on the internet. It can be time-consuming trawling the internet looking for appropriate places to link back to your website but I can assure you that it’s well worth the effort. You should invest at least a couple of hours from when your website launches to make it a happy, healthy search engine friendly site ready to take on the competition. Good luck!