A Step-by-Step Guide to Updating Your Website

If you are planning to launch a new version of your website, you will need to take some steps to ensure that you do not damage your search engine rankings in the process. When you update your website, especially if you decide to change your domain, these changes can potentially have negative impacts on SEO. You can avoid these problems by carefully planning the update process. Here is a step-by-step guide to help you update your website.

1. Figure Out the Scope of the Project

The first thing that you will want to do is start by making a list of all of the URLs that need to be updated. You can use your sitemap to retrieve a list of these pages. There are also online software tools, including Google Webmasters, that can be used to crawl your website in order to generate a list of pages. Once you have this list available, you need to check it to make sure that all of the links are viable links and that there are no broken links or pages that you simply do not want to include in the upgrade.

2. Check Inbound Links

Your SEO strategy depends on the inbound links that point to your website. As a result, you will need to perform an inbound link audit that will determine which direct links need to be updated. You should make sure that you contact the webmaster for each inbound link and ensure that they update the old links on their site. If it is not possible for you to reach everyone because of a large number of links, you should make sure to establish 301 redirects for all of the old links in order to point them to the new URLs on your updated site.

3. Update Your Content

In addition to updating the design of your site, you should also make sure to update the content on your site. Review all of the existing pages to ensure that there is no content that is outdated. Is your current SEO strategy meeting your needs? Check the analytics data for your website to make sure that your current plan is working. You may want to consider updating the keywords that you are targeting on certain low ranking pages.

Although it might be tempting, try to avoid unnecessarily deleting pages of your site. There may be pages that are having a greater impact on your current rankings than you might assume at first glance. However, if you find duplicate content on your site, do a 301 redirect of the content pages to the correct version of the pages. In the future, avoid creating pages that contain mostly similar content.

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