Here are some tips to go over before you start trying to get traffic.

It is understandable to get excited when your business’s web site is ready to be revealed to the world. Visions of sales, profit and success can almost keep you awake at night.

Sometimes it is easy to overlook some things that should be in place in order to get off to a good start. You want to make a good first impression and also get the maximum benefit from your site from the very beginning, if possible.

Proof Reading The Content
You should have someone proofread your site for you. I know first hand how easy it is for me to overlook my own mistakes. When they are pointed out to me they seem very obvious but they still slip by sometimes.

At the very least, have a friend or family member look it over. If you want to hire a professional to do it, it is pretty inexpensive. I know of one very efficient lady who charges about $5 a page.

TIP: You can use Microsoft Word to give you a hand proof reading. Simply copy and paste your web site text into Word. The program will helpfully point out spelling and grammatical errors for you. It will show spelling errors and duplicate words with a red underline.

Microsoft Word can help you double check your text for errors

Grammatical errors such as fragmented sentences will have a green underline to draw your attention to potential problems. A simple right click with the mouse on the problem will offer you some suggestions to correct it.

Is Everything Working Correctly?
Make sure you check every link. Don’t just assume that if the link is working on one page that the same link is working on the other pages.

If you have a contact form or email addresses, make sure they are set up and working properly.

Email Capturing In Place
One of the most important things you can do is have something in place to voluntarily collect your visitors email addresses. The odds are VERY high that they will only ever visit your site one time unless they have a reason to come back to you.

A lot of people will voluntarily give you permission to recontact them as long as you have something of value to offer in return.

You can give them a free report of most commonly asked questions or even simply notification of updates to the web site. This is a whole topic onto itself and will be talked about later.

It is without a doubt one of the biggest opportunities that small business web sites miss.


Evaluation
If you can manage it, a professional evaluation of your site can be extremely helpful. One of the best places to start is right here on our site with the discussion forum. Simply post your sites address and ask our members to give you their honest feedback.

You might be very surprised what some of the suggestions are.

Do yourself a favor. Keep an open mind. Try not to get offended if someone offers constructive criticism. Take it for what it is, that is a suggestion to help make your site better.

I’ve been asked in the past if I do evaluations and critiques as a consultant.

Yes I do, at $150 per half hour. I will evaluate and present a report to you based on suggestions that I have for your particular site. This can include missed opportunities that you could be profiting from, an evaluation of the site for search engine optimization and other areas for your site to benefit by.

If you are more daring (and open to public scrutiny), I do take requests for free evaluations. This is done on the terms that it will be posted for all members of this site to see. The evaluation will be honest but constructive. If you are interested in having a free ½ hour consulting evaluation, you can request one here. Any that I decide to do will be done on my schedule with the results on a page which I will announced in the forum.

In another article in this series, I’ll go over the roll out strategy to get your site announced to the world.