Has your company outgrown its current website? If so, congratulations on this important rite of passage!
It is essential to ensure the redesigned website is extremely search engine optimization friendly.
Through all the confusion and countless objectives affiliated with a website revamp, one may ignore the SEO component which can critically hurt the previously established connection privileges and status. The significance of meticulously organizing a graceful transfer cannot be overemphasized.
But what exactly is the plan? That depends upon what kind of relaunch you are beginning.
Completely New URL?
Sadly, switching a domain name can be quite intricate when it comes to optimizing search engine performance. These intricacies can commonly result in a decrease in traffic.
The usage patterns of people are partially responsible for it. People may sometimes employ area inclination, the leaning to select sites in the search results that have words they applied in their search. If searchers do not know about your recently established website, they may overlook its presence.
Google also has problems trusting new domains. 301 redirects from the previous domain of a high authority, and maintaining the relevance of the website may not necessarily result in quick restoration of its former rankings. Google puts a great deal of emphasis on the entire age of the domain and the quality of the links when deciding the rank of a website, and modifying a site’s web address will affect both of these aspects.
If you think it is necessary to restart your website on a fresh domain, be very cautious. Consider if the transition to a new domain will be worth the temporary decrease in search engine traffic.
Before The Rebuild
Crawl All Your URLs
In order to transition your content to different URLs with success, it is essential that you understand what needs to be relocated. Crawling the pages of a website can be difficult to understand and take more time than imagined, especially when the site has a complex layout and/or an especially high number of pages.
A website crawling tool is incredibly helpful in this situation. I recommend Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This tool will search your website, providing you with a list of all of the URLs that exist on it, as well as various other information related to these URLs, such as title tags, canonical tags, meta-robots tags, and more.
At this stage, it can be beneficial to look over the pages that are linked externally by utilizing Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Google Search Console in order to ensure that each page that holds links to your website is included among your content migration. Essentially, you need to find a page that has one or more external links leading to it.
When constructing fresh URLs, it is important that you ensure that each individual page is redirected to its matching new URL, so that the link authorization is kept.
Map The Moves
Some frameworks necessitate you to do each webpage redirection independently, which can be a considerable effort if your site is extensive with hundreds of thousands of webpages.
Users of the Apache Web server are in luck since they are able to utilize the Apace mod_rewrite module. This tool allows them to direct any URL to its corresponding URL on the new domain with one single rewrite rule.
For Microsoft IIS, there is a very helpful plugin known as ISAPI Rewrite that performs a similar task to Apache’s mod_rewrite.
No matter what web system you’re using, it would be of great help to make a spreadsheet that records which current URLs get redirected to where, in order to make sure each item has been properly shifted. The primary purpose of this is to make sure the influence of the old URLs will be properly carried over to the new URLs.
Audit Your Site
The unaddressed search engine optimization issues that are present in your existing website are likely to be brought over to the redesigned site. I offer my customers a full-scale audit, in addition to providing up-to-date search engine optimization (SEO) advice as part of the website redesign process — from the content plan creation to functional requirements, wireframes, mockups, the development site, the staging site, launch and afterward.
An SEO specialist should be consulted from the beginning of the process, including the part where plans are made, the structure of the site is determined, sketches are created, and coding is done. This will ensure that the website is built correctly the first time, and prevent the need for any re-do’s or quick fixes at the last minute.
During The Redesign
Meta Robots Tag Or Robots.txt Directive
Ensure that Google won’t penalize you with a duplicate content violation or list what you’re not yet prepared for them to include. There are two potential ways to accomplish this.
You can tell search engines not to include any of the pages on your development site in their listing of search results by adding the “noindex” attribute. It is possible to prevent search engines from indexing your pages by attaching a meta-robots tag with an attribute of “noindex” to all of them. For WordPress users, they can enable this setting by simply checking a box in their WordPress admin dashboard.
You have the option of employing Disallow directives in the robots.txt file. You could likewise give instructions to not index the page with Googlebot, but only Googlebot would react to that command, and Google does not support it.
Consider A Phased Approach
This comes from Google webspam guru Matt Cutts himself. Try transitioning gradually, by piecing together a subdomain, subdirectory or subcategory instead of abruptly changing everything at once. Make sure that transition works.
Reducing the amount of material being moved helps to avoid a catastrophic failure. Get going, wait for Google to scan that area, and observe the results. Then, take on the next section.
After The Redesign/Relaunch
Contact Your Linking Webmasters About Links
Utilize Open Site Explorer to find the top 100 URLs that are directing traffic, and contact any website proprietors linking to those URLs to urge them to revise their link. Although the 301 redirects will transmit the majority of the linking power, it would be most advantageous to have direct links to the fresh web page.
Watch For 404 Errors
Look at how Google manages all your 301s to ensure they are correctly put into effect in every place. If a “Page Not Found” message appears, quickly remedy it with a redirect. It may take up to a few days for the Google Search Console to show current information. If you have the capacity, have your system manager observe your Web servers instantly in order to detect 404 errors.
Run A Safety Check Of Your Important Files
Did you remember to take off the noindex tags from your test/preparation website when it was put up? Did you mistakenly overwrite the dev site’s robot.txt file with a blanket Prohibit?
Examine the analytics to identify pages on your website that are being viewed, but not getting any traffic from outside sources. Verify that your meta noindex tags and robots.txt are up-to-date.
It should be understood, but also make sure the pages you want to restrict access to are adequately blocked (avoiding indexing is preferable to prohibiting access).
Have a Rollback Plan
If things go awry, it is reassuring to know that you have a dependable contingency plan in place. Be sure to have an actionable plan prepared in case you need to revert back to your previous website, even if it is only for a short time.
Now that you know what to do. Let’s discuss the SEO content approach you can utilize on your website.
SEO Content Strategy
Make a list of topics.
Keywords still have great importance when it comes to SEO, but they are no longer the leading action taken towards gaining organic growth. Initially, it is beneficial to generate a list of ideas you desire your content to handle.
Come up with a list of approximately 10 words and phrases related to your product or service. Research the terms your business uses by utilizing a SEO tool (e.g., Google’s Keyword Tool, Ahrefs, SEMRush or GrowthBar). Gauge their search traffic and come up with a range of phrases that are appropriate for your marketing goals.
By carrying out this activity, you are linking these themes to popular simple search terms, yet you are not writing separate blog articles for these individual search words.
Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics.
In this stage, you will start fine-tuning your pages to target certain key phrases. For every pillar you have determined, use your search term device to identify five to ten more specific terms related to the first subject keyword.
For instance, we make content about SEO frequently, however, it is hard to acquire a good spot on Google for this widely searched topic with only this abbreviation. We might find ourselves in competition with ourselves by creating several pages that all aim to target the same keyword and potentially the same search engine results pages. Therefore, we produce material that covers topics such as how to do keyword research, optimizing pictures for search engines, forming a SEO strategy (which you are currently reading), and other subscopes within SEO.
This assists organizations in appealing to individuals that hold different interests and worries — eventually generating more entrance ways for people invested in your services.
Construct blog posts or web pages that explain the topics your long-tail keywords deal with and correlate them with the most important subjects you decided on. All of the keywords with multiple words in them become a group of words that focus on a major topic. Algorithms used by search engines rely on the ties between groups of data to help users obtain the data they are searching for.
Build pages for each topic.
It is highly unlikely for a page to be listed on the first page in a search engine for a few keywords simultaneously. But, here’s where the rubber meets the road.
Take the main topics you identified and write a page or post that outlines each point in an expansive way, including utilizing the long-tail keywords you conceptualized for each subject. Essentially, a pillar page can be like a catalog, where a brief outline of the major topic is given and readers are informed about the smaller topics which will be later explained in more detail in different posts.
The amount of pillar pages you make should equal the requirements of your business such as the amount of services and products you provide. This will enable your potential clients and customers to discover you in search engines no matter which words they use.
Set up a blog.
Posting on a blog can be an effective way to gain higher rankings in search engine results and interact with the people who visit your website. Every blog post presents a chance to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs), turning it into a new web page. If your enterprise has not already established a blog, it may be worth your while to make one.
As you write each blog post and expand on your clusters, you should do three things:
- Don’t include your long-tail keyword more than three or four times throughout the page as Google doesn’t consider exact keyword matches as often as it used to. In fact, too many instances of your keyword can be a red flag to search engines that you’re keyword stuffing to gain rankings, and they’ll penalize you for this.
- Second, always link out to the pillar page you created for your topics. You can do this in the form of tags in your content management system (CMS), or as basic anchor text in the body of the article.
- Once you publish each blog post, link to it within the parent pillar page that supports the subtopic. By connecting both the pillar and the cluster in this way, you’re telling Google that there’s a relationship between the long-tail keyword and the overarching topic you’re trying to rank for.
Create a consistent blogging schedule.
Not all pieces of writing you make, whether it’s a blog post or a webpage, have to be part of a thematic group. Writing about related subjects that your customers are interested in will help establish your reliability and trustworthiness in the eyes of Google’s search engine.
It is important to consider blogging on a weekly basis. Aim to write a blog post at least once a week. Do not forget that you are putting up a blog primarily for your readers, not for the purpose of search engine optimization. Do your homework on the people you are targeting and make sure the content you post deals with topics that resonates with them.
Making up a content plan could be beneficial for staying on track and concentrating on your objectives.
Create a link-building plan.
The topic cluster model is an effective strategy in SEO, however, it is not the sole means of getting your website’s content to be ranked higher after it has been produced.
The initial five steps we took were focused on on-page SEO, however the main aim of off-page SEO is link-building. The practice of obtaining inbound links (also known as backlinks) that direct to one’s website from other websites across the web is called link-building. Generally speaking, sites with a higher degree of credibility which link back to your content are taken more into consideration when determining your rankings.
Take some time to think of all the potential methods of getting inbound links. Perhaps you could initiate the process by exchanging links with nearby businesses for links to their own websites, or creating a few blog articles and spreading them across varied social networks. It is possible to look for chances to write on somebody else’s blog and then link back to your website.
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