Sowing the Seeds

Continuing on from part 1 of things to do when starting a new website, this article concludes with the other tasks you should really do when you start a new website.

11. Consider the site structure

When you design the layout of your website, ensure that it encourages visitors to look around your site. All of the main areas of the site, e.g. About, Contact Me, Archives, Search, and other major sections are easily found. Some kind of navigation bar or menu is usually the best approach. If there’s no easy way to find some particular content, chances are that visitors will not find it.

With a blog, you’re going to be releasing content on a regular basis. If you only have 10 articles or so on the homepage, you need to give visitors easy ways of finding your older and just as interesting content. So I suggest having a most popular posts plugin or a related posts plugin installed. This gives readers the chance to see other posts relating to the topic of the post they just read, and ideally keep them on the website for longer.

12. Prominent RSS Feed Logos

Having a regular reader base will help give you a baseline for regular visitors. One of the easiest ways to do this is to make it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your RSS feeds. Having enabled RSS as per point 8, put the RSS icons somewhere very visible on the top left or top right of the site. The easier it is for readers to add your feed to their reader, the more likely they are going to return.

13. Exploiting social bookmarks

Social bookmarking has it’s place when it comes to promoting websites, so make sure your site is social-bookmark-friendly. A very simple and non-obtrusive way to allow your site to be added to digg, del.icio.us and others is with ShareThis. This little icon gives users all the options they need to add your site to their social bookmarks.

14. Employ a privacy policy

If you have Google Adsense on your site, then having a privacy policy is a requirement. If you store any kind of user data, then you’ll need a privacy policy to inform your users what you do with the information you collect. For some websites, it might be a legal requirement too. I suggest checking relevant privacy laws.

15. Consider copyright violations

I’m making the assumption that you already know that using duplicated or copyrighted content on your site is wrong. It can hurt you in the search engine rankings, as well as with you being rejected from advertising systems for copying content. However, how do you stop other sites stealing your content?

If they have Adsense, you can report them via the Google Adsense reporting tool. Most sites steal content using your RSS feed, so something like the RSS feed footer plugin allows you to put a copyright message in the RSS feed as well as a link back to your original article. You might as well get a backlink out of it!

If you’ve got a bit more time, you might want to consider a more aggressive technique to stop RSS scrapers. Generally though, Lorelle has some interesting views and Pedro Timóteo has some more simple tips.

16. Building backlinks

Now this is a no-brainer, building backlinks is essential. The more backlinks you have, the higher your site is ranked in the search engines. Of course the quality of backlinks is very important, and should be from related niches to your own site.

It’s worth researching other websites in your niche, and getting friendly with them. You can exchange links with each other, do guest blogging for each other, find niche-specific directories (which might get you traffic, unlike general directories), etc. Of course, this will also allow you to learn more about your niche! This is why I said only create a site about something you’re interested in, as it will give you a natural motivation to learn more.

17. Build traffic

Not all your traffic will be a result of building backlinks. So you will need to promote your site in ways that might not necessarily result in a backlink. This includes using social bookmarking, blog commenting and forum participation. Perhaps you could create a YouTube video that’s particularly humorous, and as a result people end up visiting your website for more information.

18. Emergency and holiday cover

Particularly if you’re running a blog or forum, you’ll want the site to keep ticking over even when you’re not around. So consider thinking about what would happen if you were not able to work on the site for a week or two. Do you have friends who can help you run the site? Do you have some backup scheduled blog posts for your site? You don’t want the site to be left unattended for too long, as you’re likely to loose visitors.

19. Consider your exit strategy

At some stage in the future, you might want to sell the blog and move on to different projects. Consider how you would sell the site, how you would pass on login details for various services relating to the site and any other information relating to it.

20. Get feedback and learn from it

Get opinions from friends and family on your website and any new ideas you have. Accept constructive criticism and value the ideas borne from seeking a fresh and different perspective. You might get feedback from your site visitors, so learn from whatever feedback they give you. Consider that you are running the site for your visitors, so try to give them what they way (where it’s sensible and possible).

Conclusion

So that’s my list of tips for starting a new site. Don’t forget to read part 1 of this article if you missed it. If you have any great ideas for starting a new site, please let me know via the comments or contact form. I’ll add them to the end of this article (a great way to get a backlink if you write the tip on your own blog).