4 Things To Do As Soon As You Make Your Website

When it comes to starting up a website, truth be told that there is a long list of things you will need to do in order to get your website up and running. However, for the majority of these, such as creating social media channels, getting the right theme design for your website and more, they are not as much time dependent and do not have to be done as soon as possible unlike other ones. With this in mind, here are four things every website owner should now do in 2017 when they are kickstarting the life of a new website.

1. Buy an SSL Certificate for it – It is a trend I have noticed over the last few years that Google are looking to add more and more weight to the SEO of a website based on whether or not that website has an SSL certificate associated to it. An SSL certificate (seen in websites with ‘https://’) provides a level of encryption between the server and the web user’s computer, making it harder for information from the web user to be stolen by hackers – Google likes SSLs since it contributes to a safer web browsing experience.
2. Make sure you get your first choice domain name for your website – If you get an alternative domain name to your first choice and two years down the line you find that the original domain you wanted was available, the process of transferring a domain name over for a website, especially one with an SSL certificate, is complicated to say the least. Therefore, I would honestly tell you, from experience, that it is far better to put up with the upfront cost and purchase whatever domain name you ideally want for your website instead of settling for less.
3. Set up a Sitemap for your website – Sitemaps are ways for websites to tell Google what they have indexable and crawable to search engines like Google, making it easy navigation for search engines to find the content of your website and process it. Without a sitemap, it becomes a far more difficult process for search engines to pick up your articles, reducing the organic ranking of your website considerably.
4. Submit your website to search engines – Along with the sitemap, you need to let search engines know there is a new website for them to crawl through. Otherwise, how else would the search engines know your website would exist? This is done primarily by submitting to the big three: Google, Bing and Yahoo – each have easy pages to find online to submit your website
   With this, it is important to also sign up for Google’s webmasters tools, which provides a little more insight into your website and allows you to point Google in the direction of your sitemap, your robots.txt and more.

From reading the above points, it should be clear that the things you need to do as soon as possible when you start up a website are all related to search engine optimisation. This is because search engine optimisation is a long term source of traffic and any change you make to the SEO of a website will take a while to fully see the results – the sooner you implement good SEO for your website, the better.