Check for Dead Links
This is a must, run some kind of sitemapper tool on the website and see if you have any 404's.
Speed is Everything
Make sure your images are compressed, your website need to be as fast as it can be, word on the street is that slow loading websites are now penalised by the major search engines make sure your sitemap is in place whether you are using an xml sitemap or html sitemap, everyone of your pagrs should be in there, this makes sure that when your website gets indexed all your pages are there.
Make Sure You Have A Custom 404 Page
The cardinal sin, if you do not have a 404 page and a search engine spider reaches a dead end on your website, it will give up and go elsewhere, custom 404 pages are easy, they can be a page with a simple user message or you can direct them to your sitemap.
Get Your 301's In Place
If this is a redesigned or rebuilt website, make sure you have put in 301 redirects, this tells search engines that there is a new permanent location for that particular page. Failing to do so can cause multiple 404 errors, something you do not want.
Optimise Your JS Files
Consider using compression on your external js files, try and squeeze down the size as much as possible, the decreases latency on your website.
Using Large Images?
If you are launching a website that uses thousands of images, consider using a content distribution network, at Pebble we use Amazons CDN network. This basically serves up images from amazons servers all across the world and will serve the assets from the closest datacentre to where the user is browsing from.
Check For Browser Compatibility
Unless you have 10s of developers working on your new website it is unlikely it will render perfectly on every browser. Play the odds game, ensure your website is working perfectly under Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. You can't please everyone. If you are using flash on your website you will know devices such as Apple's Ipad, Iphone and Itouch do not play flash, consider putting a nice message in its place for these visitors.
Get Your robots.txt File In Place
This is a file that acts as an advisory which tells search engines what to index and what not to index. remember not to put anything sensitive in this document as it is publicly available if a naughty person wants to find it.
Get Your Website Listed
Get yourself over to Google, Bing, Yahoo and DMOZ and add your website. Sign yourself up to Google and Bing's webmaster tools to submit your sitemap.
Reciprocol Links
Tell your business colleagues about your website and ask if theu will add your website as a link from them to you, even better if they are in the same industry or a related industry, this builds up backlinks.
Website Analytics
If you havent done so already, you can sign up to Google Analytics for free, they will give you a small piece of code to put in your website which will track visitor statistics you can have a look at, including traffic sources and user behaviour.
Invite Feedback
Get as much feedback on your website as possible from as many different people once it is live, this will help shape future development of your website and to bring to light things you may have missed in the beginning (assuming you have not done user behaviour testing at stage 2 of your project)
These are just a few of the items you need to cover off. Good luck with the launch!
To speak to us about any of these items, please email us!