Publishing or installing a website is for many
webmaster a routine job and smaller sites are often online within minutes.
That’s the theory, but there are a lot of mistakes you can do. Sure many of
them are harmless and most of you would name them “unimportant”. Sure a website
will not break if the meta description is missing.
Website URLs, links and image paths
If your new website is an update on your existing site you need
to redirect old pages to the new URLs. It might be possible that you website
has got a complete new site structure where it’s almost impossible to match
your site URLs. If this is the case redirect at least the pages with incoming links and pages with a lot of search traffic to new pages from the same
subject. Do this for as many pages as possible, link old expired pages to the
responding section or category.
If your website is build in WordPress, the Redirection Plugin is very helpful. For most other sites
you need to add these redirection rules into a .htaccess file. Use 301
redirects and pass the “link juice” to your new URLs.
Test also all outgoing links; if your site is big
you should use a link checker tool. There are many desktop tools and online
services available. Try some of them and use the one which works the best for
you.
If you build your website on a test location, it’s
possible that some or all your images point to the test location. Change these
image paths, because after your test location is gone you will get a lot
of broken image links.
Search Engine optimization
There are a lot of tiny things you can do to rank
your site better in Google or other search engines. Here is a list of steps you
should follow for all new and updated website:
- Create always a robots.txt and block all
the files and directories you don’t like see in the Google index. Don’t
forget to remove your temporary block which was added while building
the site on your test location (or Google will ignore your website!).
- Use only the www sub-domain for your site
and redirect requests from your domain to the www variant. For many people
a website’s address starts always with www. Just imagine if your inbound
links start with the www variant while your site redirect them to the
non-www address. Most of the link juice get lost during the redirect to
the corrected URL.
- Check in your templates that a H1 element
always exists only once. Don’t have them more than once on the same page.
- Add ALT attributes for all the images
used in your website. Use “natural” and short descriptions for the images.
- Use a unique and relevant META
description for all the pages you need to get indexed by Google. The META
description will not help your site to rank better, but a good description
will raise your CTR in Google results.
- Use the robots tag “noindex,follow” for
all pages with non unique content.
- Use canonical links for all your
pages, check the information from Google if you need to know more about
this link element.
- Use a descriptive and relevant page title
(title element) for all your pages, don’t have them too long and never
trash them with too much keywords.
- Have a Google XML sitemap and add the
sitemap URL to your robots.txt file.
- If your website is build with WordPress
be sure that you change the privacy settings (Allow search engines to
index…)
- In WordPress, don’t use internal links
without a trailing slash if your perma settings have a trailing slash.
- Add a “noindex” robots tag to all your
RSS feeds.
- Use anchor text for keywords in middle of
the content.
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