Taking into account all the efforts, time and fund poured into achieving top Search Engine rankings and establishing a stream of regular organic traffic, it is high time to get cautious when building and launching a new website intended to replace an older one.

It takes a long time, even years sometimes to achieve top rankings; but if you are not careful, you can lose the ranking in just a couple of hours … and all the effort that took you several months or some years to achieve goes in vain! Here are certain guidelines that will help you keep up with the value of your website’s SEO, and at the same time reduce any likely undesirable effect on your website rankings.

Sustaining URLs and Linking Format

If you have owned a site on the web for some time, then it is wise that you establish some value for it via inbound and internal links. Prior to building a new website, it is very crucial to note that altering the URL of any previous website pages will reduce the quality or value attributed to those pages. Therefore, try and keep up with the URLs and linking structure of the previous website in this new one. For instance, if Google indexed a huge number of your website’s pages, or if your current websites internal pages are ranking already, ensure that you maintain the same URL structure in order to prevent redirecting previous links. Again, if the existing website employs a link structure that is search engine-friendly, the most excellent thing to do is to carry across that same structure to your new website for SEO purposes.

Google Analytics

Most times, a good number of website developers tend to overlook the practice of bringing over Google Analytics code to the newly built website prior to launching. Website developers should be careful to adopt this practice in order to make sure that no analytics data is lost when the new website is finally launched, giving you the opportunity to view the performance of the new website immediately. Also, you can create a footnote within Google Analytics for your new site’s date of launching. This makes it quite easier when comparing the performance of your website prior and after its launching.

Old URLs Redirect

Certainly, it will be perfect for the SEO of your website if the same URLs are kept; however, you may not be able to do this in certain cases. An instance is when certain pages on the previous website are no longer there at the launching of the new site. In such instances, although the link of an old URL is no longer obtainable in the new website, you can still keep up a substantial part of the SEO value; this is achieved by setting a 301 redirect from the previous link to a corresponding link on your newly built website.

Conversion Tracking

There are likely to be new actions with a new website, or modifications to the previous ones. Example is a new enquiry form to market your products.

The old adage ‘prevention is the best medicine’ holds true always, and launching a new website is no exception to this. It is better to prevent unfavourable things from happening when launching a new website.

Gaining optimum SEO rankings for a valuable keyword phrase requires the adoption of a link building technique that attracts other similar sites to place links of your site on theirs.
This is done using the keywords you desire to achieve a rank with. On-site SEO does not play a substantial role in the success of your overall SEO ranking; however, a well optimized website would need a lesser volume of reasonable links for attaining the higher rank.

The following are top website optimization tips for higher Google SEO rankings:

• Your Title Tags Should be Optimized

  The words that are displayed on the first line for a Google search result, is known as the title tag – this is your head line. Google includes title tags in the elements it uses to ascertain the theme or subject of a particular web page. Therefore, make sure that the keywords you desire to get a rank on, are placed within the title tags. Don’t forget that web visitors often read through this tag in order to decide whether or not to follow the link to your site. Make sure that your title tags are limited to 60 characters.

• Ensure that Your Internal Links are Optimized

  The first thing that comes to the mind of many when considering link building is on how to get other sites link to theirs – this is very essential of course. However, more often, a lot of people do not remember that they can use their own websites to establish links to their site pages which they desire to obtain a rank for. If you want to boost your SEO rankings, simply build a link from your own website pages to other relevant pages. And bear in mind that a larger website plays a positive role in better SEO rankings via internal linking – Wikipedia is a typical example.

• Every Web Page of Yours Should Have Unique Content

  When it comes to SEO ranking, duplicating content from another site or web page is a big issue. If you employ other SEO strategies correctly but fail in content uniqueness, the entire effort is in vain, particularly for ecommerce sites. A unique 300 – 500 word-count article on every page of your website will be a good basis on which Google and other search engines can differentiate your website from others.

• Each Profitable Keyword Should Have a Webpage

  If you want to achieve effective ranking of a web page for your keyword that is profitable, ensure that you remember to include that keyword in the web page’s title tags. Profitable keywords are those with monthly searches exceeding 1,000. Since there is a limit to the number of keywords you can incorporate into a page’s title tag, it is more realistic to integrate 3 – 5 keyword phrases for each page. Achieving ranking for more keyword phrases would necessitate creation of extra web pages on your website that targets the keywords, and don’t forget to integrate the keyword in title tags.