

Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website - abraham
http://sixrevisions.com/website-management/things-you-should-do-immediately-after-launching-a-website/

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bill-nordwall
Be careful with these robots.txt suggestions.

Disallowing your css/js files in your robots.txt is probably not a good idea -
Matt Cutts said as much himself: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU>

If you're running Wordpress, disallowing your /uploads/ directory will nuke
your Google Image Search prospects, as Googlebot won't be able to crawl any of
your images to begin with.

Also, submitting to a paid directory such as Best of the Web or the Yahoo!
Directory would be a much better use of your time. DMOZ is still a valuable
directory (for a lot of reasons), but the likelihood is small that they will
review, let alone add your site to the directory in a timely manner (if ever).

A few other things worth doing: \- Create a Twitter account for your site. \-
Create a Facebook page for your site.

~~~
gojomo
Indeed. Blocking JS and CSS from all robots will also cause your site to
render poorly in most web archives, like the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

------
ary
_After_ launching? Not to nit pick, but I'm pretty sure nearly all of these
should be done _before_ you launch.

~~~
seiji
Depends on what you are launching. A weekend project? Just get your work in
front of people. Something you spent six months in stealth mode working on?
Sure, get it all set up before launch during the development process.

~~~
ary
Can't say I agree with you. Even with weekend projects I'll throw some
analytics and other quantification tools in from the beginning as I want to
see what kind of traction it gets. How else would I even begin to know if
there's interest in what I've created?

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thingie
There is only one thing on the list that is not completely obvious -- dmoz
still matters. Is it possible? Sure, it's a valuable list of sites touched by
a lot of care and bureaucracy, but does anybody who wasn't online 10 years ago
know about it?

~~~
dmitri1981
I can't imagine Google pays much attention to this anymore. Many of the
categories have near absent editors and it can take over 6 months to be added.

~~~
carbocation
6 months? I've been waiting for 4 years in my category.

~~~
richbradshaw
I've been waiting over 5 now! It's a joke! I even applied to be an editor for
the category 3 years ago to try and speed it up...

~~~
zach
At least you could submit. They had some sort of catastrophe four years ago
when I tried to submit -- there was just some sort of "come back in a few
months... yeah" blurb.

I forgot all about it until I saw this, so I guess I'll check back sometime in
2013.

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bryanh
The same thing I said in their comments (dunno if they'll approve my blatant
self-promotion):

If anyone is interested in automating their fetish for checking their organic
SEO rankings, I’d be happy to give you a free spin in my app
<http://rankiac.com/>. Basically, you enter your keywords and domains, and we
email you daily with changes in ranking.

Hit me up at contact@rankiac.com if you want your account sprinkled with some
free “Pro” subscription magic dust!

Regardless, this is a good list and contains a few things I ALWAYS forget to
do (site-map & Google Webmaster tools).

~~~
akronim
Do rankings change often enough to need daily emails?

~~~
bryanh
Some people like it as it keeps their mind on SEO and their keywords. We also
offer a weekly option which might be more appropriate for some.

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gabrielroth
OK, to everyone who read this list and said, 'That stuff is all obvious': What
would you add to the list?

~~~
alexro
1) Write a blog post about your launch 2) Let others know 3) Monitor Twitter
for the chance of mentioning your product 4) Contact influential bloggers

ADD: most importantly, understand why "they" don't come :)

------
olalonde
For a more comprehensive list: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-
should-a-devel...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-
developer-know-before-building-a-public-web-site)

------
citizenkeys
Good organic seo is almost always the best way to advertise your site.
Spending money on fleshing out your site with lots of pages with lots of
relevant specific copy and keywords is much more cost-effective than simply
spending money to advertise the site.

A couple important things the article leaves out:

1) Create a cron script or otherwise automate sitemap creation. Otherwise, its
easy to forget to manually add new pages.

2) Put a useful succinct meta description in the header of all your pages.
Otherwise you leave the little blurb of text that shows up on google search
results to chance and miss potential clicks on search results.

------
yread
+1 for not saying "8 Things You Should do..."

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Yeah, God forbid you should number your main points.

Seriously, what is the problem with a list post? Yes, it's a hook. Why is that
a problem?

~~~
AgentConundrum
Personally, I don't really think there's anything wrong with a "x tips for y"
title, but it does go against the submission guidelines for HN:

 _If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective,
we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How
To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is
meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."_

I think the point of the guideline is to keep things fact-oriented here, and
to keep the amount of sensationalism, hyperbole, and "link-baiting" on HN to a
minimum.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_I think the point of the guideline is to keep things fact-oriented here, and
to keep the amount of sensationalism, hyperbole, and "link-baiting" on HN to a
minimum._

I agree that we should respect the HN submission guidelines, but the OP seemed
to be expressing approval that the original post wasn't titled as such.
Additionally, I hardly think that numbering your main points counts as
sensationalism or hyperbole. _Maybe_ it's link-baiting in some cases, but I
think that's a stretch.

------
joshrule
As someone just starting up their first website
(<http://wayofthescholar.com>), there's a lot of helpful material here, and a
lot I still need to work through.

Although each item may be obvious and discussed in greater depth a thousand
other places, a list is sometimes really helpful.

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iworkforthem
I would also redirect my feeds/rss to FeedBurner, just to have an idea the
number of subscribers I might have, and which are the more popular items
people read about me.

~~~
steveklabnik
Not to mention that you can move feeds later and keep all of your subscribers.
I've done this, it's super useful.

~~~
riledhel
And you save bandwidth and gather stats...

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Towle_
Wow!

Sifting through sixrevisions.com ... they have some fantastic shit. Good
writing, sure, but GREAT topics-- and that's _such_ a rarity.

A big* high-five to abraham for the submission.

*The kind that makes your hand sting. Because I love you, that's why.

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coffee
"Submit Your Website to Dmoz" Are you kidding me? Please, please don't waste
your time...

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terra_t
uhhhh... i can't believe so much blogspam is getting in here

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RtodaAV
Dmoz?

Good Luck getting in.

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seociety
XML Sitemap along with Google notifications goes a long way!

Many sites do not notify google when their XML sitemap is updated yet it is a
very efficient way to achieve instant indexing for new content!

While large sites with high PR are crawled frequently, crawling rates for
small/medium sites will never result in instant indexing unless they use this
method.

Use it and gain some search engine results momentum!

