Create a Favicon
Use the Favicon generator available at http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/, download the package, upload it to your server, and add the following lines to your <head> section of your webpage.
<link rel="icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
Search Engine Optimization
There’s far too much to cover in just a short paragraph, but make sure you have unique title & description tags, keyword rich content, descriptive alt tags, etc. If you want to learn more about SEO, I suggest you check out www.SEObook.com – they have a pretty cool Firefox plugin that reports keyword density, Google cache date, and much more.
Validation
It’s kind of a tricky subject, but long story short, your website should meet the web standard you are aiming for. Cleaning up all the errors goes a long way in making your website play nice with all browsers. Use the tools available at the W3 Validation Service.
Sitemap
Search engines should eventually find all the pages you created (so long as there are links to them), but creating a sitemap usually helps search engines find your pages more quickly. There are some cool online tools that will automatically create a sitemap for your website by just entering the homepage address. The best one I’ve found so far is available at www.xml-sitemaps.com.
Add Website to Google Webmaster Tools account
If you don’t already have a Google Webmaster Tools account, get one now! It provides some great tools, and some great insight to how Google views your site. It’s free, and the first step (after validation) should be to submit the sitemap you just created in the last step. Yahoo! has a similar service called Yahoo! Site Explorer that’s worth checking out too.
Submit Site to Search Engines
I’m not sure how much good it does to submit your site to Google if you’ve already added the site to your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it certainly can’t hurt. You can also submit your site to all major search engines including Google, Yahoo!, DMOZ, & Bing. DMOZ is much more difficult to get listed in, but certainly worth the little effort it takes.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool which collects all kinds of data about your website visits and displays the data in graphical format. One of the main things I like about Google Analytics is that it allows you to drill down as far as you can imagine, but doesn’t overwhelm you with information if you just want a good bird’s eye view of your site’s traffic. I also can’t help but think that a website will get indexed a little more quickly if Google is collecting data on your site’s traffic. Accounts are free and available at www.google.com/analytics. If you are a webmaster, you can also invite your client to view the data for that account without giving them administrative access.
Google Places
Yet another way to link to your website is through Google Places (formerly known as Google Local). You can add your business’ address, contact information, hours of operation, pictures and much more. Verify your account by having Google call you, and in just a few minutes you have yet another way for customers to find your business. Google Places offers some interesting advertising opportunities through Google Local as well.
Have Something to Add?
If you are a web developer and have something to add to this list, send me a comment and I’ll be glad to add it to the list! And as always, if you have any web design needs, contact me at www.Jellyflea.com.