It is important to know that site migration can severely damage your search engine rankings, if best practices are not followed. To help you avoid SEO issues, here are 5 Techniques for building and migrating your website.
- 301 redirects : If you migrate your website and don’t account for all the old URL’s, Google will find dead links within your website. This will damage your search engine rankings. To avoid this, you have to identify ALL URL’s in the old site and redirect them to the corresponding pages in the new website.
- Custom 404 page: To protect yourself from potential dead links on your website, you have to create a custom 404 page that includes links to the main pages on your new website. This will help both the search engine crawlers and your potential customers, if they land on a 404 page.
- Quickly Migrate: Generally, Google crawls your website once in every 2 weeks. If you migrate the new site quickly and apply all 301 redirects, Google will crawl your new website easily without seeing issues within the navigation of the website. Make all final website checks prior to migration to ensure a perfect changeover.
- Sitemap : Generate and submit your sitemap to various search engines using the webmaster tools immediately following the site migration and carefully monitor the account for any errors in the first few months.
- SEO: If you follow the SEO best practices throughout the development of your website, Google crawlers will be more leaning to accept your new website upon its first visit, hardly noticing the change.
