The Inevitables: Most Overlooked Factors When Launching A Website

For any business or online marketer, relaunching a website is one task that scares the daylights off them. It could get really stressful as there are a number of things to be considered in this process.

The newly developed site has all the things to catch the eye-balls of the audience. It includes graphics, videos built with Adobe videos and wonderful content. You have successfully managed to rank for some relevant key terms, which are successful in driving the highest level of traffic on a monthly basis.

What will be the result of your hard work, when your site is completely transformed?

Is it possible to maintain the rankings?

What will be the state of all the link that has been acquired over the years?

Have no fear, as there are a lot of things during this transition period that is in your control. Ensuring that you regularly work towards maintaining the rankings, preserve the online reputation and avoid duplicate content, will make sure that your company stays at its deserved place and outwits your competitors.

301 Redirects

There are all chances of creating duplicate content when planning a site relaunch. Duplicate content could prove to be harmful to your website’s reputation, sometimes inviting penalization as well. It doesn’t get any value from the search engines’ spiders as a result of it being duplicated. This compels them to provide rank to your competitor’s site instead of you.

Have a comprehensive inventory of your sites’ various URLs. Using tools like the Screaming Frog will allow you to scan your website and identify all the links within your site.

After acquiring the list of URL’s, it is vital to create a 301 Redirect that exactly outlines where a particular URL would be transferred in the new site.

Integration of Company Blog

If blogging is something that you weren’t used to doing in your old website’s promotional campaign, it’s time to start it with the new site.

Having fresh content on your new site frequently will signal the search engines that you are still active and credible to rely on as a good source of information.

This will also enable you to be found for pertinent keyphrases, entered by the users before the search engines are able to determine and recognize the transfer from your 301 redirects.

Analytics

It is essential to track all the necessary analytics in order to know how your new website is working.

Create a base report, which lists your keyword rankings, most popular landing pages and monthly traffic levels of the last six months. This will give you a clear idea on how you are performing by comparing the former results.

Page Load Speed

According to Google’s declaration on what visitors expect the most from their digital experience, they tend to stay with the site which has a fast loading time and find it more valuable than those sites that run slowly.

One way is image compression to increase the site’s load time. The superfluity and the irrelevance of the data is reduced in the images. This enables a quick and efficient manner of maintaining the data.

Search crawlers identify the type of your content quite faster if the dimensions of the image and the file size are worked upon. The lag time for online users will go down considerably with this practice.

While We Are Talking About Images, Make Sure They Are Formatted Correctly

An Image built with Flash or have a .tiff extension will not be supported by search crawlers and will be considered waste content if you are looking at it from the search engine’s perspective. Review all the landing pages to see if the images have a JPG, PNG, or GIF extension.

Fulfill All Forms of Meta Data

Before the launch of a new site, make sure that you clearly understand fulfilling each metadata into your new site.
If there is some confusion on using the keywords or how each term could perform in your strategy for pulling traffic to your website, check out Google’s Keyword Planner to test the primary and the variations of the keywords.

Structure the URLs

Restructuring the URL is an unavoidable factor if you are looking to relaunch the company website and spending your fortune on it.

Convert all the boring, dynamic and too long URLs into an organized system that could be read clearly by search engines and searchers alike. Make sure that you make the correct use of key phrases for the URL of each internal page.

Test Cross Browser Compatibility

The new site may look fantastic on Firefox, but all those who are using Google Chrome may not be impressed by your site’s look. So, it is vital to make sure that the new site should be designed in a way so that is compatible with all the browsers.

There is a plethora of online resources, which could be used to perform such tests. It is highly recommended to verify the compatibility of the website with each browser.

XML Sitemap

After all the URL’s are redirected, metadata is properly inserted and fulfilled that the site is ready to launch, create an XML Sitemap and upload it on Google and Bing Webmasters Tools. XML sitemaps allow search engines to understand properly what exactly your website is all about and connects it well with the target audience who are looking for the products or services that you are offering.

Once a new sitemap is created and uploaded to Google and Bing’s Webmasters Tools, both the search engines will be able to quickly interpret what lies within your site.

There will always be a few ups and downs in your way while launching a new company website. The only way to get more visibility on your new site is by properly managing the things on which you have direct control.

Checking out these nine steps during your relaunch process will definitely support the digital success of your new site and get it up and running.