Website Redesign - The Proper Migration Plan

Things To Remember:

Platform/URL Structure/Design

A new web site should have more pages than the previous.

Check rankings for all pages within the website

Design should allow for textual content for each page – use text based navigation (CSS) avoid using flash unless needed.

Plan out Search Engine Friendly URLs. Create a URL-friendly structure for spiders and human visitors.

Map out the Site Hierarchy carefully - how you serve up the site's content can have a dramatic effect on your search engine rankings. Determine if you should use a sub-domain vs. sub-folder strategy as you redesign your website. Avoid burying pages deep within your site;s content.

Content

Combine usability and SEO objectives

Develop a set of keywords to focus on. Incorporate keywords into pages with content.

Use real text on pages, avoid text in an image.

Aim for 400 words of content on the home page and 250 words on internal pages.

Prepare for Blended Search – make sure all video and images are well optimized prior to launching the new site.

Pre-launch Checklist: Make sure all pages from old website are matched with equivalent pages on new website

Inventory all current content and digital assets and create a matrix of old site to new site.

Evaluate existing content and try to include content that is currently ranking in the new content. Check for content that will be phased out. Loss of original content may cause existing rankings to drop.

Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on the old site to the new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

Set the TTL of the relevant DNS records to about 5-10 seconds a few days before the move. Then changes to your DNS records will propagate much faster. After the move, increase the TTL again. This will increase the load on your name server and possibly the latency of your site (because DNS lookups are slower).

The best way to keep the databases in sync when moving servers is to first import the current DB into the new host, and then set the scripts on the old host to use the new host as their database server. That way no matter which server people hit, they're always getting the same DB.

Check to see that the pages on the new site are appearing in Google's search results. When you're satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site.

- Don't do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from the old site to the new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. It is ideal to do page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) this is more work, but gives the users a consistent and transparent experience.

- If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on the old and new site, try to make sure that every page on the old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

DO NOT LAUNCH the new web site until ALL old pages/URLs are redirected to the new URLs.

Watch out for capitalization issues. Some servers are case-sensitive while others are not. If this is the case with your switch, then you should run a site-wide link check after the switchover to be sure that all links are working.

Check both external and internal links to pages on the site.

- Contact the webmaster of each site that links to the old site and ask them to update the links to point to the renamed pages (i.e. http://www.site.com/oldsite.htm should redirect to http://www.site.com/newsite.aspx).

- Check for internal links within any old content, and update them to point to the renamed pages. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don't have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like .../recipes/chocolatecake.html).

Create a Webmaster Tools account and verify ownership.

Create and submit a Sitemap listing all the URLs on the new site. This tells Google that the new content is now available on the new site and that they should crawl it.

Review crawl errors regularly

Make sure 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn't showing unwanted 404 errors.

Save a copy of the old web site

Make copy of the old on your hard drive. Call the original web something like - mysite-old. That way you'll always have a proper backup should you have to back out of the move. Use your "new" copy to make changes to script paths etc to suit the new service.