Most inexperienced webmasters or amateurs with limited SEO Techniques that work will want to discard an existing site and maybe build a new one from scratch. While their intentions are good; to launch a website that will quickly find favor among search engine spiders or web crawlers, you must ask some questions. For example; do you know why the first website failed to deliver on expectations?
Website Re-launch
Now, instead of going back to the beginning, you can very well decide to re-launch your site. It’s not rocket science but, if you don’t go about it the right way, many things can go wrong. Think about your SEO performance before doing this. This is important because you want to retain your site ranking.
The good news is that despite the delicate nature of doing so, there are tricks that will help keep you on the safer side. In fact, it is something you can do on your own.
Getting started
Think about the architecture of your website. There are probably areas that will remain intact as others change. This information will help you map out your re-launch project into stages. Here are some exceptional website re-launch tips:
Count your website pages
It is imperative to determine the number of your website pages. Google lets you do this with great speed and efficiency. When getting started, you have to conduct a domain search using Google by typing the domain after the prefix site. Something like this “site: xyz.com.”
The total number of pages that have been indexed is the size of the website. Now, it is up to you to decide the number of pages you want to include in the re-launch.
Crawling the website
The right crawling tools can help listing all URL links. Some people consider it unnecessary, but when you look at it from a value angle, doing away with poorly performing pages is something you might want to consider as a prelaunch strategy for better ranking after that.
There are website crawling tools that let you do this hassle-free, and they include the famed Screaming Frog and Xenu Link Sleuth. Even though the former will cost you a few bucks, it’s worthit.
Determine SEO value and Ranking of different pages
You need a Google Analytics account to do this. However, there are many other tools like SEMRush that can help a great deal. You may want to ask; why is it important? Well, getting to know search phrases that help with WebPage ranking is a better planning strategy for a new site after re-launch.
It would be costly to lose this valuable information and lose visibility online. According to Once Interactive, losing these important phrases will have a negative effect.
Page authority and Value
MOZ, the internet software and SEO company, provides tools that will help you determine pages that have authority. Usually, they are those that have incoming links from high ranking sites. Using MOZ tool for page authority and SEO value checker can help you plan better for a site re-launch so that you don’t end up with less valuable inbound links.
Another way is to use Google Webmaster tools. Indexing all the incoming and outgoing links using this equally useful tool will help keep your site on the radar of web crawlers after re-launch.
It helps to upgrade content
You are not going to spend a whole day doing a website re-launch because most of the activities should take you from a few seconds to several minutes. In this regard, there will be plenty of time left which is worth spending on content upgrade. But before then, it is imperative to answer some important questions.
For instance, what do you want to upgrade? On-site SEO is an important consideration to start you off. Are your keywords ranking better? Do you need to increase the quality of page content? There is always a lot to do when it comes to increasing the value of content on the website. You may want to increase the length of each page to about 1500 words, which is preferable and easy to index.
It doesn’t end there. Meta tags, keyword research, and website descriptions are things that you should also consider. And then there is the addition of relevant images with the right alt tags and videos that may have been lacking in the original website.
Work on the 301 Redirects
The 301 is a code snippet that indicates that a website has changed its location. It makes it easier for search engines to identify the new location and start indexing the pages. So, it is important to remove old 301 redirects and inserts new ones. In the same breath, let those who have redirected some of their content to the old website know about this change so that they can also undertake some updates.
XML file, robots and 404 pages
Content management systems will always create an XML file for your website. It is, however, a post launching task. During pre-launch, you may want to keep search engines away from your sites robots.txt file. Thus, it is vital to insert NOINDEX before submitting to Google Console for new page indexing.
And be sure to edit the 404 page with relevant redirects so that visitors don’t get the annoying phrase “Page Not Found!”
In conclusion, in spite of many more ways of getting a website to the highest possible rank in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), possibly the first page, SEO remains a vital element in the whole undertaking. There are search phrases that will outshine others.
Thus, prelaunch of a website should come in handy with a comprehensive website audit so that you don’t end up losing anything that adds value to a strong online presence. According to Search Engine Land, SEO value will always give a website a competitive edge regardless of how you look at it. With the help of the information in this post, you should henceforth be able to carry out a website re-launch without difficulty.
