10 steps to successfully complete your SEO migration strategy

The key part of search engine optimization is to have a successful strategy for content transfer and URL change. These are a big challenge for a portal with a lot of content.

The goal of the SEO migration strategy is:

Maintain and improve the site rankings

Maintain and improve traffic on the site

Maintain and improve link connectivity

Improve the user experience

If you don't tell the search engine exactly where the content is being transferred, the search engine will not be able to make the link point to the new URL, not the original one.

Because the number of links to search engine rankings is a very important indicator, if there is no reliable SEO strategy to solve this problem will lead to a decline in ranking and traffic loss, but also to those who originally retained the old address of the bookmark users are frustrated. Therefore, in order for search engines and users to understand where these content is placed, it is necessary to build a 301 permanent orientation.

Remember, even if the URL of the site changes only one letter, including the change of uppercase and lowercase letters, the search engine will not be able to convert these links properly.

So today I want to discuss with you in detail the SEO migration strategy

Bottom Line Report

Knowing your current situation can help you know if your implementation strategy is successful. Here are some bottom line reports that will tell you if you have succeeded. Each strategy is refined to every page you migrate.

High ranking

Large source of traffic

Current level of search traffic

The smoothness of the link (the current outer chain of each URL)

are all the pages indexed by Google and Bing?

Information architecture

The decision is not that all pages have new URLs and that every part of the site is connected (usually in a redesign). This will allow us to change the old URL to a new URL in the next step.

Content Planning

Build a table (usually in the form of an Excel spreadsheet) to present both the old URL and the new URL. Note that this is determined by the size of your migration (how many URLs do you want to change), and a 1 to 1 chart does not adapt to the constant change in the number of URLs. In that case, you need to be in the form of a many-to-many, or you can prioritize according to their current rank, flow, income, and links.

Navigation optimization

If your migration is based on a redesigned or newly created site, you may want to make sure that the template for the new navigation can be linked directly to the important content as it was. But often, navigation changes can lead to huge fluctuations in rankings (because internal links are important for search engine algorithms). Therefore, if global navigation changes, there will be a drop in traffic and ranking rather than an improved migration strategy.

Page title and meta data

This also applies to page titles and metadata. Check and ensure that the old title and description tags are transferred to the new page.

Site-wide issues

Check to make sure you migrate to a new system or Web page design, and that no site-wide or technical problems can lead to indexing problems and rankings falling. Avoid URLs that duplicate content and ensure that all content and Web pages can be detected by search engines. In particular, make sure that your navigation menu is not based on JavaScript or Flash. So search engines are hard to read.

REDIRECT Policy

Writing content maps to the server's redirection mechanism, no matter what server you are, IIS or Apache, is important to your migration strategy. You must make sure that you can have a skilled person to do this thing.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but the main approach is to make sure that your code is highly technical enough to ensure that all of your redirects are 301 permanent orientations instead of 302 temporary orientations.

Internal links

It's good to change the links that reflect the structure of your new URL. Find the sites that you have linked and let them update those links.

Webmaster Tools

Submit a new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, remember to save your old URLs to your XML sitemap to promote Google to crawl those links and promote them to build indexes.

Highly efficient and high quality

Finally ensure the quality of your work and wish you good luck!!

The source of the article for http://www.leadseo.cn/seogongsi/Shanghai, the website optimization experts, reprint please keep the source! Thank you very much!