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
-
My Website stopped being in the Google Index
Hi there, So My website is two weeks old, and I published it and it was ranking at about page 10 or 11 for a week maybe a bit longer. The last few days it dropped off the rankings, which I assumed was the google algorithm doing its thing but when I checked Google Search Console it says my domain is not in the index. 'This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn't indexed.' I click request indexing, then after a bit, it goes green saying it was successfully indexed. Then when I refresh the website it gives me the same message 'This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn't indexed.' Not sure why it says this, any ideas or help is appreciated cheers.
Technical SEO | | sydneygardening0 -
Migrating website to new CMS and to https://
Hi, We are migrating an old website to a new one built in Wordpress soon. We also added an SSL to change to https:// Most of the url's stay the same. Can we just migrate from http to https on server level, and for the url's that do change just set a 301 redirect? Or are there other things we should take into account?
Technical SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
Angular seo
Hi, how to do seo with angular ? is there an easy way to make google crawl your website healthy?
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Wordpress Website + 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I like to do a bit of auditing for our clients using SEOMoz. Once client that's using a Wordpress website had reported over a couple hundred 404 errors. However, when checking out the links, all the webpages (that I've tested) loaded just fine. Does anyone know why this would be the case? I thought, perhaps, the website might have gone down when it was crawling, but I have no evidence to back this up.
Technical SEO | | ThinkShiftInc0 -
Should I promote each section of my website
Hi, i have a magazine website and i have been heavily promoting the main page of the site thinking that all the work i am doing for the main page which includes links and so on would then pass onto the rest of my site but i have a feeling this is not correct. Can anyone let me know if i should be concentrating on each section of the site and also on my articles should i be promoting these articles or let the search engines pick them up. I already use facebook and twitter to promote new articles but i would like to know if i should be doing more than this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How can i increase my website traffic
Hello, my boss has decide a build website we have more than 12500 products in ourwebsite its mtscellular.com, im new as seo but im confused and need help i want to know how somebody help me to increase my website traffic
Technical SEO | | jimmylora0 -
Global SEO Targeting
Hi, I have a website currently on the domain example.co.uk (.com is not available) I'm looking to enter other markets such as Brazil, Russia - obviously content will need to change to suit the desired market / language. I'm looking for some information on the best practice to enter foreign markets. I was thinking maybe to create individual sites for each location eg: example.br example.ru This way I could localise each site in terms of business directories, content, language etc. Or have my example.co.uk with various languages on it Experience, suggestions are welcomed - thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0