Web Design in Oklahoma City

When launching a new site that has good search engine rankings you need to be aware that when the switch is made you can damage or even kill your current search engine rankings. In this article I will attempt to cover the main points to minimize your current search engine optimization strategies when launching a new website.  These are in no particular order:

1. 301 redirects are an important part of making sure the pages that currently have good search engine rankings will not be lost in the transition. The 301 redirect is setup on the server side and will redirect traffic from a page that existed on your old site to the correct page on your new website.
   If your old page was www.yourdomain.com/page.html the 301 redirect will take them to the new page www.yourdomain.com/newpage.html. This is NOT the same as a Javascript or browser redirect.  This is a redirect that is setup on the web server by the server administrator.
   If you cannot perform 301 redirects then you should have 404 redirects so your visitors will not get the dreaded “The page cannot be found” page. The 404 redirect will usually go to the sitemap so visitors can navigate to the section of the site they were intending to visit.
2. Make sure you have a sitemap, both in HTML and XML format. Even though having a well structured site almost eliminates the need for an HTML sitemap in search engine optimization it never hurts to make it as easy as possible for people and search engines to find your content.
3. Make sure all pages have title tags, meta tags, keyword phrases in the URL (if possible) and make sure your on page search engine optimization has been performed. If you have a good search engine ranking make sure your 301 redirects point to appropriate keyword rich copy.
4. Make sure your site has a robots.txt file and you have validated this file to make sure all forbidden files and directories have been specified.
5. Make sure you change all of your incoming links to go to the appropriate pages if necessary. To view your incoming links go to www.yahoo.com and type in link:www.yourdomain.com This could take some time depending on how many incoming links you have and how many of those are going to pages other than the homepage.

If you follow these five techniques you should be able to minimize loss of your search engine optimization when launching a new website. Find out more about search engine optimization and how we can get you started today.