Are you ready to migrate your current website over to a new platform or perform a redesign and site relaunch? These steps can be great tools for moving your company forward but they can also cause significant headaches to your search engine ranking if they aren’t done right. Working with an SEO company might be the best bet for ensuring that your rankings don’t slip during a site overhaul; however, if you are going to do it yourself, you’ll want to make sure you do these things to keep your search engine optimization campaign going strong:
Keep URLs the same. Search engines use the Uniform Research Identifier (URI) to identify content and pages on your website. If you make changes to your website, you’ll still want the new or redesigned pages to map to existing URIs as much as possible – even if you have new or changed URLs.
Use 301 redirects. There will likely be some cases where you’ll need to change URIs on your website during a site redesign or migration. In this case, you’ll want to use a 301 redirect as a way to keep the popularity of your current link and transfer it over to the new link. Doing this can help you to avoid a major SEO hit.