Prioritizing SEO Items for a New Website Launch
-
Hello, a beginner SEO question I'd love to hear your perspective on.
We're launching a new site and need to prioritize our SEO work. For a news site with multiple articles published daily, using RSS feeds to push stories to Google News is our top priority. Which item should we focus on next, an XML sitemap for Google, or an article directory based on our internal taxonomy that would provide backlinks for the individual posts to rank? Are XML sitemaps still relevant? Is an article directory a must-have or nice-to-have?
Appreciate any suggestions you may have!
-
Very helpful, Daniel. Thank you very much!
-
Thanks, Martijn! Appreciate your time.
-
I think Daniel already did a great job answering the question what you should be focused on around the migration itself. By to answer your question specifically. I would focus on making sure that the actual directory links + pages will be in place. Sitemaps is usually something that you build for making sure that there is support for them so you can have more insights. It's not something that can help you lead your SEO strategy, it provides insights but in itself doesn't create a ton of value compared to the other stuff that you can work on.
-
Hey,
Personally, if this were me, I'd focus on making sure that traffic loss was kept to an absolute minimum when I launched. To do this, I would take a crawl of your current (live) website and get a list of all URLs and do exactly the same for your new site (dev site).
You'll want to make sure that you map out 301 permanent redirections for all of the URLs from your old website and point them to the most relevant URL on the new site. For example:
http://www.yoursite.com > Add a 301 permanent redirection that goes to > https://www.yournewsite.com
That way, you will maintain as much link equity as you can and look to maintain your traffic levels when you go live.
As well as that, make sure you complete the basics;
- Meta optimization
- Fix any broken links
- Complete an audit to check for improvements
- Image optimization
Those are just a few, but there are loads more than you can do. Check out this post from the Moz blog for some extra help.
Hope this helps?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple CMS on one website / domain & SEO
For a client we would like to work with a content hub, but their website is build on a custom CMS so we are limited in our options and if we aks their web developers they ask crazy prices to help us. So now we have the idea to build the content hub with wordpress and implement it next to their current CMS. for example on www.website.com/contenthub/ . As far as i know this is technically possible and there are no negative effects regarding SEO as long as we link the two sitemaps together. Am i right or am i missing something here?
Technical SEO | | Siphoplait0 -
Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Building a new website post penalty and redirects
A website I'm working on is clearly algorithmically penalised. I've spent a lot of time mass disavowing spammy links, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. We have been planning to build a new website anyway since we are rebranding. 1. Is it possible to tell which pages are most likely to have a penalty applied? 2. If the website as a whole has a penalty, will redirecting certain pages to the new website carry the penalty? 3. Our website is structured as sales pages and blog content. It is the sales pages that have the spammy links, yet most of the blog content does not rank either. Would it be a good strategy to only redirect all the blog posts (which have natural links pointing to them) to the new website and not the sales pages? 4. The homepage has a mix of spam and very good editorial links. If I have disavowed links and domains, can I safely redirect this page?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Types of SEO Help
I have a web site that is going well but I think it could be better as far as usability and design. Also, I am sure an SEO professional would have some things to do to optimize. It seems though, that all the SEO companies either want to have along term contract or they don't work with my technology. Does anyone know of a company that would take my Visual Studio/C# project and tweak it for usability, design and SEO features for an hourly or set price?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
What I doing wrong when trying to search for links from external websites to my website
This is just the little frustrating question nothing important but I’m sure somebody will know the answer. In the white board Friday this week Rand suggested at one point that when you’re searching for results links to your website if you put a - followed by site followed by your url like –site:yourwebsite.com you get the results of pages with links on other websites but excluding your own webpages but it just doesn’t work I get no results just an error message, any idea why? If I remove the - I get tons of results but there on my own webpages……….
Technical SEO | | whitbycottages0 -
Webshop migration & SEO
Hi there I am migrating all products from my current trade website http://shop.snowbusiness.com/ to another platform. Whilst both are live, would i have to worry too much about duplicate content and no-follow the pages or is this overkill? Cheers, Ben
Technical SEO | | SnowFX0 -
Entry based content and SEO
My E-commerce team is implementing functionality that allows us to display different content based on what channel and even what keyword the customers used to reach our page. This is of course a move that we believe will strengthen our conversion rates, but how will this effect our organic search listings? Do you guys have any examples of how this could affect us, and are there any technology pitfalls that we absolutely need to know about?
Technical SEO | | GEMoney_No0 -
Internal website search
Hi, I'd like to index dynamically generated - internal website search pages - to Google. A mod rewrite to make the URL strings friendlier might be one way, but as these pages are created on the fly and effectively don't exist till the search keywords are inputted, is it even possible to index them? thanks
Technical SEO | | richcowley0