Pre-Launch Checklist
- Managing Canonicals – Only honor one version of each page on the website as all URLs should use the www. sub-domain and there should only be one version of the home page at the root level. For Windows hosted websites, the website should only honor lower case URLs and watch out for default URLs in every directory.
- Search Friendly URLs – Use static URLs that are friendly and descriptive – easy to read by humans. Limit the use of query strings and # as search engines ignore everything after the #.
- Sitemap.xml – Create a sitemap.xml that includes all URLs on the site based on sitemaps.org protocols.
- Site Performance – Be sure to optimize and compress all images, media (ie: swf files) while minimizing HTML, CSS, and JS code. Also, move CSS & JS code to external files and use browser caching and Gzip compression for the HTML code.
- Website Hierarchy - Only the most important URLs should be added to the navigation and they should be logically organized into multiple content categories, with little if any pages at the root level. Use breadcrumbs on each page to establish hierarchy and keep important pages only 1 or 2 clicks from the home page.
- Navigation – Must be readable by search engine spiders (exposed in source code) and it is better to use text, rather than images so spiders can read the content.
- Content - Page titles must be customizable per URL and allow for 70 characters minimum. Allow for at least 250 words per page and keep content readable as text (do not conceal in images, Flash, Javascript, etc). Use alt image tags on all images.