How to setup a medium content website redirect for a migration in 30 minutes
Hello there!
During the Rayvan re-branding to RayvanBros at the beginning of the year - we decided to leave our heavily seo-friendly website rayvan.net to become secondary - in order to migrate the individual page strength, we redirected relevant content to their newly due places. Leaving every other page to become a custom Page Not Found web page (404 error code) that leads back to the new website.
On the same topic - We were recently consulted for a private government contract to advise a realistic recommendation for migrating a 15,000+ page website into Drupal. But please do understand this is a totally different animal - although we are not talking about animals. Pages with 500+ pages should be systematically migrated.
So how do you assess if your website require systematic redirect or migration? does your website have a consistent URL file structure patterns? If so, they can redirected appropriately without the need for a 404. Here are 3 steps to make it happen (assuming your new web server is on an Apache-based server):
- Setup the new website on a separate domain or private subfolder, if applicable. Generate a robots.txt file to block search engine crawls.
- Use Apache's HTACCESS to setup a global redirect to identical file names to their respective directories or new domain name and/or directories.
- All content that does not exist on the new domain should be connected to the new website's internal search engine that will use the previous file name's keywords to query all of the new web pages for relevance. If you do not have the time or budget to setup an internal search engine - contact us or use Google's Custom Search Engine - it is very easy to plug-in to your template and you can just pay the yearly commercial license fee if you need to remove advertisements
That's the gist. If you are an or hire an experienced web team performing this duty, it should take approximately 30 minutes for a small to medium scale website. Did anything confuse you, do need help with all or some of these steps? Drop us a line and don't be afraid to leave us feedback.
Thank you for your valuable time.
Is your website hip with blogging?
Do you have a blog on your website? If not, its time to look into it.
Blogging is rapidly becoming a new marketing technique on the web. And the later you start yours, the more likely your target market will become saturated with competitors. Why is blogging the new thing? Here is 3 key points:
- Social Media is now a widely recognized marketing tool
- Fresh website content in blogs keep search engine spiders coming back for more
- This is a blatant fact but if you position yourself as an expert and have the credentials/experience/license/bond/insurance to back it up to your visitors; Then you'll get loyal, repeat customers
Technical Details:
If you already have a website design/development company or individual working for you who has made a blog but you aren't seeing results. Firstly, be patient, search engine spiders can take a few weeks to a few months for results. Especially if your keywords have heavy competition or your designer/developer simply doesn't have search engine optimization experience.
The first things you want to look for are is your blog located within your domain. Quick methods of this would be going to your website, clicking the blog link, and seeing if your domain changes on the address bar. For example, yourwebsite.com changes to typepad.com/yourwebsite instead of being at, say, blog.yourwebsite.com (which is a sub domain). If you don't even have a domain, you're in a completely different world of hurt. You need a top level domain (.com or .net, preferably) to make a good mark on the internet.
The next thing is how easy is it to update your blog? are you using the latest and greatest Wordpress or Drupal?
But mainly and finally, you simply want to go over statistics over keyword traffic to your website. Niche targets are always a better start than broad terms.
So, what point are you at with your blog?
Give us a ring for some website training wheels.