SEO TIPS AND TRICKS: AN EASY MISTAKE TO MAKE
It's an easy frame of mind to get into. You're building a new website, and you want to start fresh. You want to put the old site in the past and start with a clean slate. It's understandable, however don't be so eager to shut down that old URL and all that goes with it. It could still have tremendous value to your company and could be pivotal in getting your new site traffic. In this article we outline a few simple SEO tips and tricks which will help you avoid one SEO mistake that's easy to make.
SEO is an essential part of your current website and will be an even greater part of your redesign. Why? Because SEO is the cheapest and easiest way to drive traffic to your website! If properly done, it can pay huge dividends for your business by driving new and relevant visitors to your site. However, you may not know how helpful an old website can be to SEO especially when changing your website URL. There's no doubt your old website has traffic on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. People are visiting your pages, Google has crawled your site and your pages are showing up on search engines. But if abandon your URL along with that old website you could lose all that traffic and everything that comes with it. By simply having traffic and being visible to search, Google has created a detailed SEO history and credited your website based on the traffic and content within. Essentially, you have an SEO score and that score has value.
This short 'how to' will show you how you can use the SEO value that your old site has created to benefit your new website redesign. It's pretty easy, but can be extremely effective at helping your new website generate traffic and credibility right from the get go.
WHAT TO DO:
Website redirects sounds pretty easy right? Just use simple redirects to your new home page and bam! Well not so fast. A little strategy when using redirects goes a long way, especially if your old site was receiving a lot of traffic.
Step 1: determine what pages are high traffic
- The first step is to take a look at your old websites' pages and determine which are getting high traffic. These pages will be the most important in driving traffic to your new site. They will also most likely be the most visible by most search engines and will be essential to SEO for your new site.
- Make sure to make notes on which pages are receiving the most traffic and what the purpose of those pages are, it will be crucial in the next steps.
Step 2: identify 'like' pages on your new site
- Now that you have a nice list of high traffic pages on your old site, take a look at the pages on your new site. You want to identify pages on your new site that are similar in content to your old site. For example, if you have an 'About' page on your old site and are creating an 'About' section on your new site, that would be a like page. Sounds simple right? But it's not always so...
- Say instead of creating an 'About' page on your new site you decide to do a 'Team' page or a 'Company' page, or maybe both. Or maybe on your old site you had a 'Team' page and a 'Company' page and now are consolidating into a single page. It's important to identify that these pages are alike as this will greatly assist when deciding what redirects to put where.
- It's easy to just redirect all your old pages on your website to your new URL home page but it can be much more effective and user friendly if visitors to your site are finding the appropriate pages on the first click, not the second or third.
Step 3: insert your redirects
- You've done your analysis, you have a strategy, now it's time to insert those redirects. There are a variety of ways that you can accomplish this depending on what platform your website is built on and the level of control you have over it, but the principles are the same. If you have cPanel access, you can create redirects right within that, and it's fairly simple and straight forward. There is also fairly easy HTML code that can also accomplish this task. If you're using a CMS platform like Wordpress, there are nice little plugins that you can use that will make it very easy to achieve right within the platform.
- Using the 'like' pages you've identified in Step 2, start placing your redirects appropriately. Redirect old 'About' pages to your new 'About' page (or company/team page as mentioned before!). Redirect your old home URL to your new home URL, and so on and so on. This will ensure that when people click on any links within Google search they are being redirected to the appropriate page on your new website. You don't want people clicking on 'Services and Pricing' and being brought to your home page. That means more clicks, and more work for your visitors. That's bad! You want to keep that great SEO credit you've built up with your old site while simultaneously making it as easy as possible for your visitors.
Step 4: test!!
- Now that you've implemented your redirects on the appropriate pages, it's time to test. Go on Google and type in the appropriate keywords that would normally show your site. See how Google displays your old site, and click on the links provided. Make sure that everything is in line with what you did in Step 3 and fix any redirects that are broken or going to the wrong page. Broken links are bad and will hurt your SEO score which will not benefit your new website.
Step 5: watch your hard work pay off
- The hard work is done, now it's time to sit back and watch your work pay off. You should see that old traffic being routed over to your new site instantly giving your brand spanking new site traffic even if the URL has changed. It's an easy thing to overlook when designing a new website, but is crucial. Even if you're not changing your home page URL, your page URL's may still have changed for individual pages. So make sure that any old pages are redirecting to your new ones just in case those old URL's are still floating around somewhere on search engines.
CONGRATS:
If you've followed the steps above then you've successfully avoided one of the most common SEO mistakes that companies make when redesigning their websites. Remember, SEO is so incredibly important to your website that taking simple steps like adding redirects can really help you get started on the right foot.
If you liked this entry in the SEO tips and tricks series of blog posts, please let me know below. Also, if you have anything to add or would simply like to comment feel free. If you'd like to get more tips and tricks on SEO mistakes to avoid when designing a website click here and download our PDF on the topic! Thanks for exploring our blog!
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