Have you recently launched a new website? Do you know what it means to launch a new website? Have you recently relaunched your website at the same domain? Have you recently relaunched your website at a new domain?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should continue reading.

First of all, Congratulations!

Launching a new website is very exciting, whether you are launching a new e-business website, a Blog, an online magazine, a family website, really any internet venture, it is exciting business. Upon launching you will likely be clicking all around your site, making sure that everything looks and functions just the way you imagined that it would. During the first couple of days you should look for anything that doesn’t feel friendly for you as a user. Try to remove yourself as the owner of the site, and accept that there may be some less than friendly sections of the site that exist because you know how the site is supposed to work, but your new users might not find intuitive. If the website is one that you are hoping will attract traffic for sales or readership, then there are a few things that you’ll need to focus on.

Is the written content on the site unique? If you have copied and pasted information from elsewhere on the internet, you’ll want to focus on rewriting content that is unique. The search engines don’t favor duplicate content, and it will not do much good for a new website to publish old information. Search engine robots are excellent content sleuths.

Have you optimized you website with unique keywords for your product or content? There are many great tools available to you from Google, Yahoo! and MSN that allow you to research the most relevant keywords for your venture, and how competitive those words as with regard to where you might rank against the competition for similar keywords. Use your keywords within the context of your content, but don’t stuff keywords so that the content reads poorly.

Do you have unique meta information for each of your website’s pages? Meta information includes title, description, and keywords. The meta title of your page is the title that appears at the top of a browser window when you are viewing a web page. The meta description should be a cohesive statement, unique to each page, describing the purpose of the content on that page. The description information is typically used by search engines on the results page under the title of the page, before the url. Meta keywords should be created per page so that search engines have cross referencing information with regard to how they should index your website.

Valid CSS and xhtml. This has to do with how the website was created. If the programmers and designers of your website have created a site of valid css and xhtml, then you can rest assured that your website is going to work well and allow easy, smooth crawling for the search engine robots. If not, spend some time checking for errors on the site and develop a plan to clean up any errors that might exist.

Now that your website has launched, get the word out. Register your website on as many ‘safe’ directories that you can find. Get on the internet and participate in forums relative to your website, and mention your url. Make sure to include your url on your business cards, in email signatures, and see if you can get friends to mention your website on their websites. The more eyeballs you can get on your url, the more quickly you will notice traffic on your website.

Use the webmaster tools at Google, Yahoo!, or MSN to find out how your traffic is acting. Read as much information as you can find about how to market your website, and how to optimize the content therein for users. It is important to understand that, depending on how much competition there is in your field, you may not see conversion traffic for a long time. Conversion traffic is that traffic on your website that converts to a paying customer.

If you feel that you are not getting enough traffic, look at your website and try to determine what you can do to improve the content, or quality of your information.Search engines offer submission, if you feel that your website hasn’t been indexed, submit it to several search engines, it may take a few weeks or a few months. There is no hard and fast information about how quickly you should expect traffic, but if you have designed a quality website with quality, unique content, the traffic will come.

If you have relaunched your website with a new design, or with new improved content, new information architecture, or have just moved to a new server, you need to make sure that any page that has not been reproduced has a 301 redirect. This permanent redirect action will automatically forward traffic from one address to a new one. If you have a new website designed using a different platform, ie. your urls have changed in any way, then you need to make certain that traffic to your old urls will forward to their new version, or at least some similar page on your new website. There are obvious reasons for this, so that your visitors can still find your website from the urls that they might have bookmarked, from links on other websites, etc. The not so obvious reason, search engines find those old links that no longer lead them anywhere, and they decide to ignore other links to your domain, this can be very detrimental.

Likewise, if you have moved your website to a new domain, don’t leave the old site hanging around the old domain. This has recently become a larger issue, as duplicate content issues have been leading to removal from search engine indexes. The important issue here is, don’t leave old information on the internet, using 301 redirects, reroute the old urls to the new ones, or to the new home page if there is not a similar page on your new website. The old information that is sometimes left at the old address can be viewed as duplicate content, or might be mistaken for your more up to date information. So, again, the lesson is, clean up and close down any old websites that you have or have had, and concentrate all of your internet traffic on one website.