Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results.

Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one:

1. Never rename or delete a page (well almost). If you are contemplating a site change, be mindful of your page names and extensions. If you make changes with abandon, you will loose any ranking associated with those pages and your site.  This can be specially tricky if you are moving to a content management system or changing platforms.  301 redirects are critical to this process,
   see: Never delete or rename a page.
             
2. Before you make changes, you need to be sure you don’t derail existing traffic. It’s important to know what pages are receiving traffic on your site. You want to know what terms or phrases are attracting attention. You want to know what external sites are linking to and insure there is equivalent content going forward. Review analytics data and web logs before you make changes. If you don’t have tracking in place, don’t wait to add it.  I recommend installing Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools at the very least to see where you stand. You can’t tell if you have made improvements or where you may have gone wrong, unless you have some history! 
   See: Getting Started with Web Analytics Tools

Read more…

SEO Huntsville 301 redirects, mod rewrite, SEO Huntsville, SEO Tools, Web Analytics, webmaster tools

I mention in my earlier post that you should choose to use www or not , but regardless, stick with it. Another issue that arises is that you can’t always control how someone else will link to your site. While many will include www. others will not. To insure that all you links are cataloged in the search engines uniformly, you should implement a couple of rules in your .htaccess file.

1. A rule to insure www is (or is not) always used.
   To Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]To Redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

2. A rule to always redirect your home page (index.html, index.php, default.htm, etc) to just root (http://www.yourwebsite.com/)
   REDIRECT 301 "index.htm" http://www.somewebsite.com


There’s is a good guide on mod rewrite here  at the source.

While it won’t apply to most of the people reading this blog, it is also important not to have multiple views of the same information. So if you have a site with a page of toasters and you give the browser the option to sort by price, color, etc, be sure that the spiders only see one sort of the information.

SEO Huntsville 301 redirects, mod rewrite, SEO Huntsville, spidering