How To Make Your New Site Search Engine Friendly

So, you have a successful online business and decide to have a fantastic new website built in order to show the world how serious you are.  How will Google and the search engines be able to find your new pages? How will returning customers – who may have bookmarked pages from your site, still land on the right page? What about all those links from other sites to your pages?

Luckily, help is at hand!  In this second post of Just Roger IT! The Manchester SEO blog, I will discuss tactics to ensure your website structure allows traffic to flow like water through a Japanese Zen garden water feature!

Sitemaps and Search Engines

XML Sitemaps and robots.txt are key.  Believe it or not, Google will periodically try to index various pages from your site independently (not all at once) and it will know something has changed if it reaches for an inner page which is no longer there.  If it fails more than twice it usually tries to reach for /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt in your root folder. A vital part of SEO is ensuring these are in place will cause Google to crawl all of your site at the nearest opportunity, otherwise it could be weeks, perhaps a month or two until it has indexed all your pages.

Redirecting from Old Pages

The most poweful bit of magic, is making sure that your server tells all visitors where their favourite pages have moved to.  There are several search engine and SEO friendly ways to do this, depending on how your site is hosted.  If you have PHP enabled, and your files were previously .php files, you can use the follow method for redirecting an individual page:

<?php
header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-address.com/pagename" );
?>


But what if I have a lot of files, perhaps not all PHP? A trick I find really useful, is to use an .htaccess file (this can be placed in the root directory of your site, or added to your existing one). You can use the following structure to tell your server to redirect old requests to new ones:
redirect 301 /doors.html http://www.example.co.uk/showCat.php?id=22
redirect 301 /windows.html http://www.example.co.uk/showCat.php?id=31
redirect 301 /conservatories.html http://www.example.co.uk/showCat.php?id=30
redirect 301 /aboutus.html http://www.example.co.uk/about.php
Generally, it is a good idea to make a note of what pages you had, and ensure you have a contingency plan to ensure you do not end up with missing files as the dreaded 404!

Redirecting to a New Domain

It might be you have moved domains, perhaps you previously owned somedomain.co.uk and have bought somedomain.com which has the same structure and wish to redirect all requests this way (but keep the rest of the URL the same), you could use a general rewrite rule with a 301 redirect such as: Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.somedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

As always with SEO, it is all about your visitors. Especially those who are returning, you want to keep all those valid backlinks and bookmarks! Be aware of your website structure!

Tags: Google, manchester, new domain, redirecting, search engine friendly, SEO, sitemaps, visitors