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Top Tips For Re-Launching A Website

If you're thinking it's about time you revamped your website, then read on

If youre thinking its about time you revamped your website, then read on. A revamp could be anything from simply updating the content or re-arranging the layout of the pages to a full site re-design. Keeping your website fresh and up to date is important for your website visitors and for your rankings in the search engines. However, before you start, you need to ensure you dont fall into the common traps that businesses can encounter when updating a site, particularly if it involves launching a brand new website.

1. 404 error page
Its essential you have a 404 error page on your website. Weve covered this in a blog post on the Savvy Marketers website, which you can read here: Are You Turning Your Customers Away, but basically its a dynamically generated page that loads when someone comes to your site from a broken link (perhaps an old page that is still in the search engines database) or if someone clicks on a broken link within your website. Heres an example:
Savvy Marketers error page; we apologise to visitors and ask them to continue navigating the site

If you dont have one of these pages, a visitor will end up on a browser error page if they click on a broken link instead, which doesnt look good.

The only way to navigate out of it is to hit the back button in your browser and return to where you came from, which is often a search results page. When launching a new website, make sure you have a working 404 error page so that if visitors arrive on your website from an old web page thats still in the search results, youll retain the visitor on your website and not send them away to your competitors!

2. 301 Redirects
If the content on your new website is fairly similar to the content that was on your old site, but youre changing the actual page urls (or page names), .e.g from aboutus.htm to about.asp, then you can redirect the old page to the new page with a 301 redirect. This is done by your webmaster on the websites server. This is a technical job, but it ensures that the search engines will follow the redirect from your old web page to your new web page and know they need to index the new page instead. This will also help with any links youve gained from other websites – the links will follow through to the new page with the redirect and keep your link popularity intact.

3. Website Optimisation
When launching your new website, make sure you optimise it as soon as possible (ideally while the new site is being designed), particularly if the old website was fully optimised. The last thing you want is for your website to lose its rankings that you worked hard for when promoting your old website. Youll find rankings will fluctuate for a few months anyway when launching a new site, but optimising the new website early on may lessen the impact.

4. Google Webmaster Tools
Finally, set up a Google Account if you dont already have one and use the Google Webmaster Central tool that will tell you of any problems Google has indexing your website and when it last indexed the site, which pages it has indexed and even some stats on click throughs to the site. This is a very useful free tool that gives all sorts of information, so well worth setting up – just ask your webmaster or designer to do this for you as you will need to add some verification code to the site. Make sure you give your sitemap url to Google and also add a sitemap to your new site. Again, this is important if youve re-arranged the content for your new site. If some previously easy to find content is buried deeper into the site, you still want the search engines (and visitors) to be able to find it easily.

Following these tips wont stop your websites rankings from fluctuating for a few months when the new site is launched, but should see results eventually bounce back. Just re-launching a website without taking the above precautions will involve a lot more work in regaining any rankings that your website previously had.

© Savvy Marketers, 2011
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About Savvy Marketers
Sam McArthur and Louise Barnes-Johnston are the Savvy Marketers! For a free copy of "The Ultimate Small Business Guide to Marketing via the Internet" visit: www.savvymarketers.co.uk
We offer internet marketing strategy, consultancy and training to small professional service businesses and e-commerce sites. Our combined experience and expertise covers areas including: social media marketing, search engine marketing, blogging & email marketing.

Sam
Fortyfirst

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