New site for company - what to remember?

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1

Okay i am doing a website for a small company.
They wanted a new site because the old one needed a new design. I am now done with the site.

But regarding SEO/google (maybe other stuff) i want to make sure i am not forgetting anything really important.
Right now they are ranking very good on google seach and i do not want do mess that up. Is it a good idear to maybe copy the old sites meta desciption or should i just delete their site and upload mine ?

Please correct me if it is outdated or wrong.

  1. Make a sitemap from “xml-sitemaps.com”
  2. Submit site to google, bing yahoo ?
  3. Title tags (with good keywords),Meta description tag (with good keywords), image “alt tags”(with good keywords), no duplicate content.
    Any other important meta tags ?

Am i missing out on something ?

Thanks in advance

Ingenting

2

I’ve heard that it’s important to validate your HTML & CSS, and to have descriptive alt tags for images.

3

The ranking their site has now is for the pages they have online now, so it’s important either—

  1. to use the same page URLs for the new site, or
  2. keep a record of the old URLs and do an htaccess redirect from the old pages to the new ones.

That way, you get to keep some of the good value those pages have in the search engines.

4

Don’t delete old meta tag and keywords ,but one thing you can do,you just research for few new keywords ,that are in demand according to market and match with your business prespective.Just put it in your newsite,for grabing more site with old data.

5

You could also add a canonical tag, just to make sure Google sees yourwebsite.com and www.yourwebsites.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com as one page.

6

Keep the old site up with no content - just a blank index - for at least 6 months. Says google. Redirect the old site via the htaccess like this http://www.websitecodetutorials.com/code/htaccess/301-permanent-redirect-old-domain-to-new-domain.php

7

You should submit the search engine to show search engine. You should take necessary step for on page and off page optimization.

<snip>

8

Ingenting,

You should do all the stuff you mentioned in your OP however pay particularly close attention to what ralph said. If you do not maintain the same URL structure or redirect old pages to new ones, you will lose all rankings for the company. Even if you did none of the other things, redirecting or maintaining the same URL’s is key. Not doing that is like moving your store front and telling no one where you moved it. You would lose a lot of established foot traffic and get a lot of calls on where in the heck your store went.

Here is a good tutorial from Google on moving your site,

Hope that helps,

Shawn

9

Thanks for looking into it everbody.

[I]"Keep a record of the old URLs and do an htaccess redirect from the old pages to the new ones.

  • Ralph.m[/I]

Could you show me how to this (maybe a link)? Tried google, but no luck ?
He has alot of pages should i manually copy all pages, not quite sure how to do this ?

You could also add a canonical tag, just to make sure Google sees yourwebsite.com and www.yourwebsites.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com as one page.

Is this also important if i am not using a CMS ?

10

If the old and new URLs follow a consistent pattern, it may be possible to set things up such that a rule can be constructed to redirect the old to the new all in one hit. But otherwise, you may just have to cut and paste all the page URLs of the old site and do a redirect rule for each one. Obviously, that could be a lot of work. It’s not really my area, though, and specific advice is better sought in the server configuration forum.

11

How important is it to redirect ? Does everbody really do this ?

12

Make sure you use Google Webmaster Tools and check out optimization->Html Improvements.

After crawling your submitted sitemap.xls the following warnings will be shown:
Duplicate meta descriptions
Long meta descriptions
Short meta descriptions
Title tag Pages
Missing title tags
Duplicate title tags
Long title tags
Short title tags
Non-informative title tags
Non-indexable content

Also check for Health->Crawl Errors:
DNS
Server Connectivit
Robots.txt Fetch
Access denied
Not found
Not followed
Other

I believe Yahoo and Bing have similar reports