Analytics and Search Engine Checklist for a New Website Launch

Prior to being launched, most websites go through a Quality Assurance (QA) process but rarely does this process address even the most basic Analytic or Search Engine issues that are affected by a website launch. When launching a new (or redesigned) website make sure you have at least addressed the following issues:

Website Analytics (note: urls are for illustrative purposes only and are not meant to work).

• Verify the website analytic code has been implemented on the new website.
• If your using Google Analytics its usually more effective to setup a new profile for the new website analytics (while retaining the old profile for the old website seperately).
• Redirect popular URLs of the old website to the most relevant new webpage.
• New or existing subdomains on your website. Example: http://xyz.rwebconsulting.com/.
• Popular landing/entry pages that are marketed offline or online. Example: http://www.rwebconsulting.com/email-campaign.
• Top 25 Entry Pages – Use your analytic reports to find the most popular entry pages on your website and setup redirects to the most relevant new webpage.
• Business Critical Landing Pages – Meet with product owners to determine any landing pages that they might be using in online/offline communications. Example: www.rwebconsulting.com/top-product.
• Other Domains Being Used. Example: www.rweb-consulting.net, etc.
• Analytic Setup – Verify you have configured and setup the following:
• Goals that are dependent on page urls, etc.
• Filters that are dependent on page urls, etc.
• Segments that are dependent on page urls, etc.
• Downloads, Flash or Outgoing links - Create "virtual page views" for document downloads, mail to links, audio files, social media links. For info on how to set this up in Google Analytics click here.
• Add appropriate GA code to 3rd party applications.
• If the 3rd party application is hosted elsewhere (example: the root domain is different) you will need to "pass" the GA cookies b/w domains. For info on how to setup this up for Google Analytics click here.
• If the 3rd party application is hosted on a server that has the same root domain add your default GA JS code to those applications and consider setting up a unique profile in GA to track usage of only that application. For info on how to set this up in Google Analytics click here.

Search Engines

• Increase local search engine visibility by adding your website to Google: http://www.google.com/local/add and Yahoo: http://local.yahoo.com/.
• Submit an XML sitemap (you can generate a free one at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/) to Google’s Webmaster Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and Yahoo’s Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.
• Identify any webpages you don’t want indexed by uploading a Robots.txt file to the root directory of your website.
• Submit your website to free search engine directories.  Example: http://www.dmoz.org/.

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