Configure the tracking and SEO tools
After your site is (let’s say) ready, the next step is to create the external accounts. What are the external accounts? Well, it’s a bunch of external tools which will help your site to be seen, to be easily find and to rank better.
It can be tracking accounts (like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity), SEO accounts (Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools), Social Media accounts (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Twitter, etc), antispam accounts (Askimets, Antispam Bee, etc) and even monetization accounts (Amazon affiliate, etc).
Setup Google Accounts
Google is the driving force on the Internet. It’s critical that your site is ‘Google-ready’ to maximize the likelihood of success. Next we need to set up several accounts at Google.
– Important Note –
Google has excellent customer support pages, so I’m not going to walk you through each of the steps of setting up the various Google accounts, but we recommend that you set up a Gmail email account first and then link Google Analytics and Google Search Console to your Gmail account.
Even if you don’t use Gmail for your email program, that’s fine. Google has an ‘accounts’ feature that works nicely when you use your Gmail address as the cornerstone of your Google accounts. It makes things much easier when all of these accounts are linked by one common Gmail email account.
Setup Bing (by Microsoft) Accounts
Bing is the 2nd biggest search engine, after Google. Why not to get the best from this extra big piece of pie?
Here, I suggest you to create a Bing Webmaster Tools and a Microsoft Clarity account.
Setup WordPress.com Account for Askimet
Comment spam on blogs and web sites is an enormous problem. Fortunately, WordPress comes pre-installed with an anti-comment-spam extension called Askimet. In order for us to make use of Askimet though, we need to set up a WordPress.com account. Go to WordPress.com and open an account.
Do not skip this step
After you’ve activated your WordPress.com account, log in, then go to your Global Dashboard (from the ‘My Account’ link in the upper left hand side of the page), click on “Profile” and then copy the API Key. The API Key will also be sent to you via email after you’ve activated your account. You will use this API Key to activate Askimet for each of the web sites you launch. Keep the API Key handy. This step is very important. Spam will take over the comments sections of your web sites if you don’t install Askimet properly.
Setup Social Media Accounts
I will not explain how important is the Social Media for any business nowadays. I suggest you to setup and link the accounts from these social media companies: LinkedIn (biggest business network from the World), Xing (the German alternative to LinkedIn), Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. You have a ton of other accounts to setup, but I think the 5 mentioned in this paragraph are the must-have.