You’ve just finished redoing your company website, and the only thing left of the old site, is the domain name. It’s exciting to relaunch a website, but sometimes there are some simple things which can slip through the cracks if you’re not careful. With this in mind, we are proud to offer this quick checklist to ensure you don’t miss a beat onto your new website. Following these steps should reduce the chance of any drop in traffic from search engines.

1. Ensure you have a good 404 Error Page Not Found

The goal of this checklist is to ensure your visitors will not end up at a 404 page, but you never know what a user will type. For this reason, you want to make sure you have a 404 page to keep your visitors from getting annoyed, and help them find the page they might be looking for.

More than anything, a new site will probably mean a new website structure and potential dead-ends. So, while you are waiting for search engines to crawl your new site, your old site will still remain in the index.

Later on in the checklist we will talk about ways to avoid this problem, but in the meantime, you still want to make sure you have covered all your bases.

Google recently focused on the issue of custom 404 pages at their official blog. More importantly, Google is now offering a new enhanced 404 widget for your website. See below for an example (click to enlarge)

To get your own custom Google 404 page, just log into Google Webmaster tools, and head over to the tools section, once you click into the domain you are working on.

It doesn’t matter if you choose your own solution or Google’s, but the best in class custom 404 pages should offer the following:

• A link to your main page (and to your sitemap, if you have one). This is the easiest way for users to seek out what they want.
• A search box. If you have a site search, add it your search box  to your 404 page. If you don’t have a site search consider adding a Google custom search box restricted to your domain.
• Keep it simple. Don’t blame the user for ending up there. Keep it clear and simple people somehow got to a page that does not exist. Keep the design simple and avoid putting an image rich page. In short, the user needs to know they arrived at the wrong page and then find their way back on track. Quick and easy should be your motto.

If you do not have access to a custom 404 page, we will give you a solution that will cover that issue in the next step.

2. Permanent Redirect

This might seem hard at first, but bear with us, it’s a simple solution that basically guarantee no loss of traffic from search engines, affiliates, link partners even if you have completely restructured your website. It also means your custom 404 page will rarely be seen.

Here is the hard part, you need to compare your existing site map with the new one. We assume of course you have one, if not check out our post about sitemaps and how to get one quick. The goal is to ensure where you have two pages with the same topic, you mark down where the page should go in the future. This is called a permanent redirect (also known as a “301 permanent redirect”), where the old page address will be permanently linked to the new page address . We suggest creating a table in excel to compare the two. It will take time, but you only need you do it once.

The 301 can be placed in the old pages such as below:

PHP Redirect

<?php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?> 

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

For more languages check here. For larger sites, you should consider having  a 301 redirect via your .htaccess file. What is an .htaccess file? It’s a simple file that is very powerful. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors. When a visitor/spider requests a web page (via any means), the web server will check for a .htaccess file. In this case any competent web designer should be able to help you with that. If you need to do it yourself, this article should get you started.

3. Notify your key link partners

If your site has been around for a while, it is certain you surely have many other sites linking to it. Again this another big job, but it doesn’t need to be so. The simplest way to get a list of sites linking to you, is to setup a Google Webmaster account. Under the tools section, you can see many of the sites which are linking to you and which page they linking to. For the most part your permanent redirects should care of this. If you can’t set up a 301 redirect, then you will need to begin the tedious process of contacting them,  and hoping they modify the links to your site relatively quick.

Also don’t forget to update any affiliates or any online advertising campaigns you have. Nothing would be worse than forgetting to update your Google AdWords account and throwing away money to an error page or a missed 301 redirect.

4. Update your sitemaps

As soon as you launch the new site, quickly generate and upload your new sitemaps. Google, Yahoo and MSN all use the sitemaps.org format. You can get a sitemap online from XML sitemaps (max 500 pages) or you can download gsitecrawler to build a unlimted page sitemap quickly.Getting in your new site map as soon as possible will help the search engines to re-index and it will speed up the deletion of the old pages from search engine results.

5. Test, test, test

Finally, run a link checker tool once the new site is uploaded and online. A couple of great free online tools to use are: W3 checklink or dead-links.com to make sure there are no internal links missed. It never hurts to run this test once a month just to make sure you have no issues. Long term your Google Webmaster account will also notify you should any pages “go missing”.

We hope this checklist was of help. Should you require any more help with your transition, please don’t hesitate to contact Mark8t E-Marketing Solutions today.