If you are planning to start a website / blog or if you have already started one then here's a post that would guide you / help you to understand step by step process. Starting anything is not easy. But, we should also make sure that we have everything maintained in a consistent manner.
Everything in this list is working great right now. For starting StackMantle we also followed these steps and made sure that we have maintained the consistency.
Let's dive right in...
- Blog / Website Name
Yes a brand value is important, make sure you choose a name which is unique and describes your agenda to start a website. Your name is your brand value going forward, so you have to make sure you maintain it. Below checklist would help you to choose a perfect brand name.
- Brand Name: Make sure you choose a brand name that is easily memorable and could be a perfect fit across web, 12 characters or less should be perfect. Ex: StackMantle, the name is unique and is same across all web, it's perfect in such a manner that it can also be customized URL for most of social platforms including twitter
- Brand Logo: Your logo will act as a face for your brand value, make sure it resides the message of your Brand Name, if you are not sure / are willing to make a brand logo later it's perfectly fine, for a temporary perspective you may keep your Brand Name as your logo as well, just to cut it short unless you figure out a logo design
- A perfect cross check: Do make sure you go over web and social media platforms to check if your chosen brand name is unique / has very less results / has no results, this would avoid duplicate / unnecessary results to collage with your content / name
- Submit your website to Search Engines
You should submit your website to search engines like Google and Bing so that they can start crawling your website and show results in search. Ideally you should sign in to developers console of respective search engines(Google WebMasters for google and Bing WebMasters for Bing, etc.) and then submit it. It is a bit long process(We'll be sharing in upcoming articles - Developers console) but, for now you may visit Google or Bing and just type your brand name or paste your website URL and hit search. Visit your website link, this will trigger a new URL / content source and their bots would start crawling.
It might take few days to reflect your content on Google / Bing because there are millions of website and it takes time to index each website. A max 2 to 3 days would be an ideal scenario to reflect results for new websites.
- Social Media (Name and URLs)
Before you are planning to purchase / register a domain name, make sure you check on Social Media for name / customized URL if it is available. Let me try to explain in more simpler way. Let's say i've chosen a brand named StackMantle, before purchasing stackmantle.com i would go to Facebook and check if facebook.com/stackmantle is available or i'll go on twitter and check if twitter.com/stackmantle this process would be same for other platforms as well like LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. This would help give my brand a consistency in URLs and name. Some points that you would like to keep in mind.
- Making sure brand URL is consistent across social media: facebook.com/stackmantle, twitter.com/stackmantle, youtube.com/stackmantle, pinterest.com/stackmantle, linkedin.com/in/stackmantle, linkedin.com/company/stackmantle. If you look at the URLs you can see that it is perfect for the brand name that we have chosen, we do not have any clashes to make it unique
- Avoid Obfuscation: Always make sure you do no complicate the URL like facebook.com/stackmantle.official or facebook.com/stackmantle.com or some other. Just keep it short and precise. Obfuscation will only lead to confusion for your users if they want to memorize / access it easily. This will also help you to maintain your brand name
- Content Sharing
After you are done making your blog live and registering your customized social URLs now comes the major part that would be a backbone of you website i.e Content. Strong / unique content would help you to not only maintain your brand value but also search engines love unique contents. It also helps you to keep you audiences / subscribers engaged because they're learning something new.
- Avoid Plagiarism: Make sure the contents you are sharing on your website / blog are not copy pasted, this would not only hamper your website's ranking on search engines but would also would make your users lose trust on your content. Moreover your website would be like some other website providing some copy pasted content and that's not good
- Sharing Frequency: Content sharing frequency matters, you cannot just end up sharing content once in a week / bi-weekly / monthly. Do keep in mind that search crawlers like Googlebot and other web crawlers start crawling once you have submitted your URL to search engines for crawling. If they do not find any new content coming to your blog frequently then it's no point to Index it. Ex: Why would you go to a teacher who does not teach anything rather you would go to some other teacher who shares valuable information
- Social Media Sharing: If you're posting some content over your blog make sure you also share it on your social media platforms(Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp) so that you can get some amount of traffic and people start knowing about your blog presence. If you don not have any content to share on your blog you may share a engaging content like an opinion poll, facts to keep your audiences engaged
- SEO Audit Checks
We're all set but here comes an Important factor named "Search Engine Optimization" AKA "SEO". Yes you should make sure that you website is SEO optimized On-Page. If you're using platform like Blogger / WordPress, you may use plugins like Yoast SEO / some other plugins. But if you're planning to develop it from scratch you need to make sure you have covered all the imp aspects of On-Page SEO like metadata, schema data, proper titles and much more. In our upcoming articles we're going to cover it make sure you subscribe to StackMantle, you may click here to quick subscribe.
You may use online tools like WooRank(For Advanced Coverage) or SEOptimer(For Basic Coverage). StackMantle team used these 2 tools for automatic SEO Audits, some manual checks are performed in Backend. Make sure you keep checking it every week / Bi-weekly to make sure you're improving / doing well. If something is going wrong you should improve it.
- Performance Checks
Google recommends if any website loads within 3 seconds it is to be considered as optimal and avoids bounce back of users. StackMantle team recommends to use all possible techniques to make sure your website loads within 3 seconds, If your website is a bit heavy you should make sure that at least your website should show something in first 3 / 5 seconds. this would allow user to start interacting. If you're using Google Scripts like AdSense or Analytics they tend to hamper your website performance in loading. In our upcoming articles we're going to cover it make sure you subscribe to StackMantle, you may click here to quick subscribe.
You may use online tools like GTMetrix(Recommended as it display results in detailed) or Google PageSpeed Insights these would help you to understand where you need to improve and how.
There are lots of supporting content to this post which we are going to share in upcoming articles. Stay Tuned and subscribed!
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