It was suggested to us that we further explore/update tactics based upon our blog post titled "You've Just Launched your Website...Now What?" We welcomed this suggestion and now we bring to you; Part 2! In this post we'll discuss how to make your website better after its launch through some new ways of monitoring, analytics and the utilization of web tools!
Create files that will improve your site
You've just launched your site, but there may already be some ways to improve it! If you haven't done so before the site launch, make sure you have created the following files that will immediately improving your website:
- Robots.txt - used to declare which parts of your website should be off limits for website crawlers
- Favicon.ico - This gives you the ability to stylize your site in a way that will give it an identity to browser bookmarks and favorites. It is also seen to the left of website URLS and in tabs in other browsers such as FireFox. Ours is shown below.
- Sitemap.xml - A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It is a way for engines such as Google to discover pages that they may not otherwise discover.
- Dublin.rdf - a Dublin.rdf file acts as a container for officially recognized meta elements which can augment the semantic value of the media you provide.
- OpenSearch.xml - OpenSearch.xml files identify and describe a search engine and publish search results in a standard and accessible format. Learn more about OpenSearch.
Utilize Web Tools
Utilizing Google Webmaster Tools is a great way to see several things about your site. These include any errors that were encountered, links pointing to specific webpages, keywords Google sees as being frequently used on your website, and any security compromises.
Monitor
We briefly mentioned in Part 1 the importance of monitoring your new website using Google Analytics and Woopra. To recap, these platforms will track visits to your site, see where people are coming from, what they're looking at, and will identify areas of opportunity on your site. Monitoring and utilizing web analytics for your site is still important in determining where improvements to your site can be made.
You need to go beyond just monitoring site performance in these areas. You can easily monitor in two other ways:
- Monitor Mentons: Google Alerts. Google alerts are emails that are sent to you when Google finds new search results that match the term you specified. These are often results such as mentions on web pages, newspaper articles and blogs. This will help you monitor all mentions of your website or brand.
- Monitor Rankings: Rank Checker is a FireFox plug in that is a helpful tool in seeing where your website ranks in search results.
Submit
Submit your sites URL to dmoz which is an open directory. You can think of dmoz as a catalog of the web. Submission of your site will help in SEO efforts and aiding others in finding your business.
Other directories to consider submitting your site to are: