Taking into account all the efforts, time and fund poured into achieving top Search Engine rankings and establishing a stream of regular organic traffic, it is high time to get cautious when building and launching a new website intended to replace an older one.

It takes a long time, even years sometimes to achieve top rankings; but if you are not careful, you can lose the ranking in just a couple of hours … and all the effort that took you several months or some years to achieve goes in vain! Here are certain guidelines that will help you keep up with the value of your website’s SEO, and at the same time reduce any likely undesirable effect on your website rankings.

Sustaining URLs and Linking Format

If you have owned a site on the web for some time, then it is wise that you establish some value for it via inbound and internal links. Prior to building a new website, it is very crucial to note that altering the URL of any previous website pages will reduce the quality or value attributed to those pages. Therefore, try and keep up with the URLs and linking structure of the previous website in this new one. For instance, if Google indexed a huge number of your website’s pages, or if your current websites internal pages are ranking already, ensure that you maintain the same URL structure in order to prevent redirecting previous links. Again, if the existing website employs a link structure that is search engine-friendly, the most excellent thing to do is to carry across that same structure to your new website for SEO purposes.

Google Analytics

Most times, a good number of website developers tend to overlook the practice of bringing over Google Analytics code to the newly built website prior to launching. Website developers should be careful to adopt this practice in order to make sure that no analytics data is lost when the new website is finally launched, giving you the opportunity to view the performance of the new website immediately. Also, you can create a footnote within Google Analytics for your new site’s date of launching. This makes it quite easier when comparing the performance of your website prior and after its launching.

Old URLs Redirect

Certainly, it will be perfect for the SEO of your website if the same URLs are kept; however, you may not be able to do this in certain cases. An instance is when certain pages on the previous website are no longer there at the launching of the new site. In such instances, although the link of an old URL is no longer obtainable in the new website, you can still keep up a substantial part of the SEO value; this is achieved by setting a 301 redirect from the previous link to a corresponding link on your newly built website.

Conversion Tracking

There are likely to be new actions with a new website, or modifications to the previous ones. Example is a new enquiry form to market your products.

The old adage ‘prevention is the best medicine’ holds true always, and launching a new website is no exception to this. It is better to prevent unfavourable things from happening when launching a new website.