Ever created a website for a small business? Well there are some things you probably did or needed to do to make the site a success.

This is more of an internal list but I figured I’d make it into a blog post because this might help other designers/developers who do work for small businesses as well.

This list covers just the final checklist for a small business site, if you have any ideas to add to it please leave those in the comments. We would love to add more ideas to help out our future and current clients.

1. XML Sitemaps

Every site, large or small should have a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress there is a great plugin that will create a sitemap for you called Google XML Sitemaps. If your not using WordPress (you should be), you can use the XML Sitemap Generator.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

Adding a site to the Google Webmaster Tools seems like a minor detail, but it can provide a vast amount of information and details about your site.  A few features of Google’s webmaster tools include: Malware diagnostics, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, search queries, and links to your site.

3. Analytics

Even if your client doesn’t want the statistics for their website, you should install analytics so you can track the site and set goals. Personally, I think Google Analytics is top notch but some other good ones are Mint and GoSquared.

4. Google Local Business Center

To allow your client to get the most bang for their buck, you should make sure they are listed in the Google Local Business Center so they will appear in Google Maps and related search results. If you can’t do this for them then consider shooting them an email with a link to the local business center, so they can do it themselves.

5. SEO Checkup

This seems minor but I often over look setting the page titles and descriptions. The key to the SEO checkup is making sure none of the pages have the same title tags or descriptions, as this could have a negative effect on your rankings. Some prefer to do this while building the pages and some prefer to do it all at the end. It is all personal preference – no right or wrong way to do it as long as it gets done.

6. Social Security

Not the program run by the United States, but  take the opportunity to lock up names on social media sites for your clients such as twitter, facebook and more. This will not only allow them future room to move into social media but prevent someone else from taking the names.

Wrap Up

Some might think this list is common sense, but you would be surprise how often I forget to do one if not more of the above before we launch a site. Most of these take only a few minutes, but it’s time no less. We budget in an extra hour into each project to make sure we can accomplish all of the above for our clients.

At the least we send the client an email with instructions on how to do this themselves. I’ve found little tips like this really help build trust with your clients and it shows that you care about their business and that you want their business to succeed on the web.

Many thanks to Meredith Marsh of FLX Creative for proof reading this post!