Taking your Website Live - The Need to Know List

Your website has been designed and built. Now you need to publish and promote your website in order to generate sales. The following points will guide you along the process and will help you to avoid some of the mistakes.

Selling Online:

1. Add a PayPal button
2. You can list and sell your products on eBay and Amazon
3. You can build your own e-commerce store using a Web designer or template based Web store

Your e-commerce software should comply to the following:

1. Can the software grow with you business?
2. Can you include special offers?
3. Does it include a newsletter, e-mail, guestbook, blogging and affiliate linking?
4. Is it easy to highlight your top sellers?
5. Does it include effective sales analysis?
6. Does it allow you to offer volume pricing?
7. Study Amazon.com for some store ideas

To ensure high rankings on the search engine results pages, use SEO effectively:

1. Get the most from you URL - be creative
2. Use the most effective keywords (high search volume and low competition)
3. Create search-friendly page titles incorporating your keywords
4. Highlight your keywords
5. Focus on your keyword density (between 3% and 5% for pages with a lot of text, less than 10% for pages with less text)
6. Emphasize your text links
7. Include variations of your keywords
8. Link every page to other pages on your site
9. Make sure it is easy to navigate for your customers (resources: Google's Webmasters Help centre, The Backlink Assistant, Search Engine Marketing  Professional )

Test your site:

1. Checking for spelling and grammar more than once
2. The consistency of your pages and navigation across your site
3. Test all of the links
4. Can your pages be printed
5. Submit your site for customer reviews
6. Ask the following questions:
7. Will your customers understand or have questions about the information on your site?
8. Does your website flow and is it easy to find your way around?
9. Do your pages load quickly?
10. Do the pages print ok?
11. Are the videos, audio and images the right size?
12. Are your products and services clearly displayed?
13. Is you shopping cart easy to use and is your shopping cart trust worthy?
14. Are all of the forms easy to understand, fill in and send?
15. Test your site across all browsers and make sure that your site works on all platforms and operating systems

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Use an optimization provider on the web for additional information.