Over 100,000 new website domain names are registered daily but not all rank well on internet search engines. Websites that are Search Engine Optimized (SEO) upon launch and regularly optimized afterwards have a far greater upfront chance of success. The following checklist is designed to get websites off to a positive optimized start straight away.

Firstly a new website needs to be accessible and clearly visible on the internet. Users and search engines need to be able to easily find all the pages associated with the website and they should be error free and avoid content duplication. Webmaster Tools provided by Google is a fantastic free tool to help diagnose and correct website problems in regards to page visibility on Google prior to website launch.

Then target keywords to bring traffic to your website (the correct words make it easy for search engines to match your website content to queries). Choose words that people are actually searching for (have search volume) and that accurately relate to the content you want people to see on your website.

Next is quality website content. Having search engines find your pages through keywords and then not having relevant and useful content for users is not going to make your website successful. You need to look at what will be useful in answering their query. Do you need more statistics, images or information references? If you get this right, users will be pleased and return to your website; and you will receive more web traffic from search engines as they also look for quality and value for users.

Good website design and usability is critical. The services of an expert web designer will help greatly to get this right but you could also go with a simple design and test it out on friends and colleagues to get feedback on how easy it is to use and find content. Act on improvement suggestions to get the website right because if there are problems when launched you will not get return users.

Social networking and SEO go hand in hand. Search engines give priority to links and items shared on sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn (which all have hundreds of millions of users). Set up accounts and share website content consistently on social media to gain positive web traffic and get people talking about your site.

Finally link building without creating spam is critical to your websites success. Establish high quality links with reputable and relevant websites to ensure they appear on search engines and attract the web traffic you desire. Start with asking good customers and business contacts to link your site on their website, blog roll or social networking page. Look at relevant blogs that you may be able to submit a guest post on, or contact local news media and inform them of your site, perhaps request a review website to look at your site and so on. Build quality links and you will rank more highly on search engine results.

Bio – Ruth Rogers is an internet marketer that also enjoys writing custom assignments, social web marketing, and search for other fun methods to bring mega traffic to sites.