The following list should serve as your checklist before the "Go Live" date for your business website. These things may seem obvious, silly, not worth mentioning, but they are the groundwork for website business optimization techniques. If you ignore them and it could result in disaster. Taking months of planning, time and money and throwing them in the dumpster within minutes.

Here we go:

1. Triple Check all your links. Broken links leave a horrible impression on your visitors about your business because it shows lack of attention to your website. It makes it seem like you do not maintain your business website and, in turn, you must not take much care of your business (or customers!). Since we know this is not true, avoid broken links using tools online like this SITE LINK ANALYZER TOOL: seochat.com/seo-tools/site-link-analyzer. It will check for broken links automatically. Make sure to tell your web designer to fix any problems you find. I can not stress the importance of this !!

2. Spell check. I know, I know … DUH! Seriously people, this one is often overlooked because you would never think that your web designer would overlook spelling. I mean, you are paying for this website, so the least they could do is spell everything correctly! The reality is that a website can have many features, images, fonts, alignment issues and little things that your web designer could get cooked up with in an effort to give you a great site. The thing is, spelling can sometimes be overlooked. All you have to do is put your domain name into an online spell checker like: netmechanic.com/cobbrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm and it will take care of the rest. Enter your URL and that site will check the spelling on your Web pages for you.

3. THE FOLD: Everything that's on your Web page, in the area you see before you have to scroll down, is "above the fold". Studies have shown that, whatever you have on your Web page that is supposed to impress your visitors (the reason for your business website), must be above the fold. Otherwise, they probably will never see it. It could be catchy headlines, bulleted content, highlights of your product or service, a promotion or whatever! These things must be positioned above the fold so people do not have to scroll to see it, otherwise, they might not scroll.

4. Attention spans are not high among people who surf the Internet! I'm not saying that people who surf the net have some kind of problem or disorder! People are busy and on tight schedules combined with way too much information causes people to surf quickly. If you have too much information on your pages, people will not read it. The most that they will do is skim information, but do not clutter your home page or include too much information because people will not take the time to read it if they do not know who you are or what you're about. If you have a lot of information to give to your visitors on your home page, consider combining text with audio or video that plays automatically, but make it so they could click stop at any time. People are OK with listening to something informative, but they will not read it if it's too long.

5. Do not use too many images. Use your best judgment here because there are different scenarios and a multitude of businesses, so sometimes images are necessary to illustrate your message. Just do not be excessive on the amount of images. Sometimes it's necessary to use a large number of images, but sometimes this could distract your visitors from receiving the message that you want to deliver. Finally, remember that there are still some people who use dial up. Although not a large number, every visitor is a potential customer, but if the site loads too slowly, they will go somewhere else. One more thing about images: If you do use images use the description of the image and the image name for SEO. Search engines will crawl your images as a sepearate item so give your image (s) a name that is related to the topic of your site / post. Search engines will give the image weight when ranking your site or blog post so use them wisely.

That's it! Use this checklist before your launch date and you're on your way to success! Do not take this lightly, these topics are important! This is a checklist that we always use with all of our clients and it has been formed through a combination of common sense and trial and error, so we know these items are essential to a website's success.