Testing Inbound Marketing Blog

Day One Of Launching a New Website

So we just bought this domain name this morning and this blog posts will describe the first thing that anyone should do from a webmaster standpoint.

1. Buy Domain Name through GoDaddy - Personally I'm a big fan of purchasing domain names through GoDaddy.  It's easy to point the DNS to hosting in other locations and they actually have a pretty good domain manager system.  I manage about two dozen domains in their interface even now.  One tip I will say is that whenever buying ANYTHING through GoDaddy always be sure to do a Google search for "godaddy promo code" because you can almost always save some money in purchasing your domain names this way. 
2. Setup a Content Management System (CMS) through HubSpot - Let's be honest I work at HubSpot so getting access to a portal is a nice employee perk.  HubSpot has an easy to use, powerful CMS along with a collection of other Inbound Marketing Tools. 
   
3. Setup Webmaster Tools - There are multiple tools for a webmaster to help them manage their website, but in this specific case I'm talking about setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account.  This tells Google that you own the domain and it notifies them to start crawling the website.  Also be sure to turn on your sitemap.xml file so Google knows all the pages on your website.  HubSpot has this funcationality built right in, but for any other system you should really checkout xml-sitemaps.com for more information.
4. Install Google Analytics - Once again being on HubSpot we have instant access to their analytic tools so we don't necessarily need to install Google Analytics.  There is one very important SEO reason for installing this though.  Because Google gets access to the Google Analytics data believe it or not, but installing this also helps yoru site get better indexed and crawled by Google.  So there is a nice perk in there.    
5. Setup Feedburner for Blogs - Feedburner is a defacto standard for any RSS feed that you have on your website.  Google bought Feedburner a few years ago and once again this is another plus to help you get indexed faster and crawl more of your website.  Whenever a new post is written the RSS feed is updated and actually goes out and "pings" Google along with a host of other web crawlers.  
6. Start Creating Content - Now that you have all the basics ready start building out your website and creating content.  Remember a website isn't a magazine so it doesn't have to be perfect when it goes to press.  Now remember that design come after content. If you have the greatest looking website and no content then you will still fail, right?  So start creating content and figure out the design as you go.  Remember it's a brand new website so nobody is going to visit it but you to start out.

So we have done everything we can to start ranking in Google ASAP now we need to start building out the content so we don't fail those first visitors.  Wish us luck!