What should be done before starting the site? Checklist from Doubletapp

So, your site is ready. You can finally show it to the world and wait for the first users … That not exactly true! Experience shows that before a product launches, everyone is so excited about the release that they miss out on a few important details. Therefore, we decided to dress up in the costume of the Captain of Obviousness and made a checklist, running through which, you can make sure that nothing important is missing.

We will help search engines

1. Robot.txt file
   What kind of animal and where does it live?
   robot.txt is a UTF-8 encoded text file. It is created specifically for search robots and shows which pages need to be indexed.
   To check if your site has such a file, follow the link http://www.example.com/robots.txt
2. Sitemap.xls file
   This is another technical file. The main and only task of a sitemap is to create a sitemap, a list of all the pages that are on the site.
   When pages are created or deleted, information appears in the sitemap, and search engines take this information for themselves. If the page is not registered in this file or there is no file at all, search engines simply will not know about your site and will not give it out when searching.
   Important: be sure to include a link to the sitemap in robot.txt
   You can check if there is a map on the site by the link: http://mysite.ru/sitemap.xml

Checking Title, Alt, Description

These three parameters can be divided into two groups: required for pages and required for images. Let’s start with the pages and make sure to set the following parameters correctly.

Title
This is the SEO tag for the page. As the name suggests, it describes the title of this page. The tag can be the only one per page. Why is it so important?Because, firstly, Title is what the user sees in the browser bookmarks and in the control panel.

Secondly, this is the tag that users see in search engines.

And, of course, links to external sites. Title is visible when placing a link to the site in social networks, on profile portals or when sending to private messages.

Hopefully, doubts about the importance of the Title tag have cleared. And now, briefly about how to work with it. Three short rules apply here:

• Title should not be longer than 50–65 characters
• Keywords should be placed at the beginning
• It must include the name of the company

Description
Like the Title tag, Description is needed to optimize the site’s performance. He is responsible for the description of the page. On the page, unlike Title, it does not show itself in any way. Description generates snippets of search engines.

Also, the tag is displayed when posting links to external portals.

Description is used by search engines when indexing and ranking pages in the SERP.

It is recommended to use 140 to 200 characters for Description
Do not copy it from Title and use a unique description on each page
Use keywords at the beginning of the description

Alt
Alt tag is needed to describe the image, if the image is not displayed, and for search engines. Always describe images honestly, do not use descriptions longer than 200–250 characters.

And while we are talking about displaying links on external portals: be sure to check that for each page you have an image that is pulled from the site.

The files were parsed, the tags were parsed. Phew! What great fellows we are.
There’s just a little more left, I promise.

Three points are also fundamentally important for search engines:

1. Fav-icon
   A favicon is a small image on a tab with your site. Small size does not detract from its importance, Fav-icon should be mandatory, in an ideal world — have the .ico extension.
2. Availability of schema.org and Open Graph markup. Markup helps search engines to correctly form snippets and better structure information.
3. The presence of a configured ssl protocol.

And again about search engines

The files were parsed, the tags were parsed. Phew! What great fellows we are. There’s just a little more left, I promise.

Three points are also fundamentally important for search engines:

1. A favicon is a small image on a tab with your site. Small size does not detract from its importance, Fav-icon should be mandatory, in an ideal world — have the .ico extension.
2. Availability of schema.org and Open Graph markup. Markup helps search engines to correctly form snippets and better structure information.
3. The presence of a configured ssl protocol. The purpose of ssl is to ensure the security and reliability of the transmission of confidential information, including personal data, payment information, or login information. Also, this certificate affects SEO. Google (or Google representatives) point out that sites with ssl statistics will outperform sites without ssl, all other factors being equal

The last three (and very important!) Points

1. Privacy policy and notification settings when you collect cookies.
2. Registration on Yandex.Metrica and Yandex.Webmaster, installation of the code on the site.
   The metric allows you to track how many visitors came to the site, how they found you, which referral sources they use, how old they are and what gender they are. This information will help you understand your target audience, create content and advertising campaigns that will give the maximum result and profit. The webmaster is more focused on monitoring the state of the site: are all pages indexed by a robot? Are there any mistakes? Are internal documents read correctly?
3. Sign up for Google Analytics and SearchConsole
   Both resources are from Google. Like Yandex.Metrkia, these services allow you to track and understand user actions, notify about the status of the site, errors. Through SearchConsole, you can check the work of robot.txt and sitemap.xml, check the indexed pages.

That’s all. It turned out 11 points, if not guaranteeing a successful release, then at least reducing unexpected “surprises”. It remains to check, tweak and send for release.