Press 2.0: redirect

Showing posts with label redirect. Show all posts

Friday, November 9, 2018

Site launch checklist

I was recently asked for a checklist of essential items to check on a website before it launched. So I have shared it with you all here:

Page titles
You should know by now that every page must have a page title. It's what appears in the top of the browser for that page and how it gets shown by default as a bookmark or Social Media post.
However it is also a key Search Engine Optimisation ranking factor, so ensure that it is relevant, the right length (approx 55 characters including spaces seems to be fine) and ideally unique across your new site. There is also a significant consensus in the SEO community that the keyword you are targeting for this page should be as close to the beginning of this title as possible.... but I will leave that for you to assess the value of.
Also since Google usually displays just the first 50–60 characters of a title tag, I would keep to that range without very good reason.

Meta data / Meta tags
These have grown in the number and function they perform over time, with some having a bearing on Social channels and SEO. But the key one here is Meta Description.
I'm not going to give you advice about what to exactly write in this field... as I've covered it in so many other blog posts. However, ensure that have a description on every page (correctly placed inside the <head> of the page). Plus consider that the current average length of the description field for desktop results is around 160 characters, whereas an average of 130 characters for mobile seems to be the best.
Note: Ignore using Meta Keyword tags

Sitemap
This little text file (mostly named sitemap.xml) usually sits in the root directory (or obvious sub-directory) of your site. It is a tried & tested way to tell search engines which pages are available for them to be crawled. It does this by giving a list of URLs for every public page in the site along with extra metadata about them.

Robots.txt
This little text file (all lower-case only please) should sit in your root directory of your site. It is usually the first file a search engine bot checks on a site and is there to tell all or individual bots what they are NOT supposed to do. For example, they are supposed to ignore certain directories or files.
So in this way it is the opposite of a sitemap.xml file and care should be taken to not have pages in both.
Note: some search engines may ignore the robots.txt so do not use this as a way to hide site content or data you definitely don't want found.

Redirects
When launching a new site, URLs can change.
At the most fundamental level, this can mean a change of domain (e.g. brandx.com to brand y.com) or a change of sub-domain (e.g. blog.brand.com to brand.com/blog). So sites should ensure they understand and handle all redirects correctly at new site launch.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Why Include WWW When Marketing Your URL?

I've seen a bunch of recent criticism (on Linkedin actually) for a company that used "www" at the beginning of their URL in some of their marketing material. Although there was a bunch of other issues with the advert shown.... in my opinion the use of "www" in the web address didn't even warrant a mention, let alone an outburst of ridicule. But apparently this was a major modern digital marketing faux pas.

So does adding the prefix, short of World Wide Web, really look dated or unprofessional?

I don't think so.

Whilst technically you can have either (with or without the "www" sub-domain) I don't think it makes a bit of difference whether you show it or not.

However...

For Search Engine Optimisation benefit, make sure your site is available on just one of the two URLs ("www" and "non-www") and not both at the same time... by redirecting all traffic to the main one

You can obviously decide not to show the "www" in your adverts if you want to make better use of space (again, make sure you have the correct URL redirection in-place)

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Have a redirection strategy when changing your site

Lots of companies I speak with are changing and updating their websites, it’s the natural evolution of things (and also keeps us digital agencies in business). Some of them are carrying out complete overhauls of their online presence, including:

Re-platforming (e.g. moving to a more enterprise content management system)
Changing the design of the user interface and navigation
Applying a new site structure

When doing all or some of the above, one very important thing usually gets forgotten… the redirection of old page locations to their corresponding new URLs.

Why is this important?
Well, for a start, you hopefully have previous visitors who have bookmarked specific pages with the aim of returning to them at a future date. You would not want them to get the ubiquitous ‘404 error’ that tells them the page is not found on the server.
Secondly, you want to preserve as much of the SEO value of each page as possible. Current thinking (and input from search engine optimisation authorities such as Google’s Matt Cutts) says that the majority of PageRank Juice’ is transferred to the target page when you do site re-directions correctly. And the correct way of providing redirect is via a 301 redirect, which tells the incoming page request that this is a permanent redirection.

There are some important things to note here:

The amount of Google PageRank that you lose through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a normal link.
A 302 (temporary redirect) passes 0% juice through to the target page, so should be avoided when optimising your site for search.

Therefore for any sites realistically bigger than a few pages, it is important to plan your redirection strategy. But not just as you are cutting over from one site to another, but as much in advance as possible. In other words, ideally as soon as the new site map and page content have been agreed.

You then have the job of mapping old URLs to new URLs. This can be quite simple if both versions are similar. However it can be far more complex when pages are split across different subjects or when you have an entirely new approach to your site content. So plan your redirection strategy in detail and make sure you are sending users and search engines to the most relevant new location.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Handle redirects correctly

Our company (Ideal Interface) has been working on a number of client engagements this year and we've seen a number of ways that their websites handle the dreaded "Page Not Found" situation.

This occurs when resources (web pages to you and I) are moved or renamed, but links or bookmarks still look for the old URL.

Usually a dreaded error comes up that says "Error 404, resource not found" or something similar - unless you let Google take control of this and automatically suggest useful alternatives from its search index.

So what can you do about this? You obviously can't have exactly the same website structure and page naming convention from one generation of your website to the the next (and some evidently can't even have this from one week to the next).

My recommendation to handle this is to set up site redirects correctly, so that you give the user what they want. Now some websites build 'custom 404' pages that are more palatable than the generic & bland page I've already described. These will politely tell you that the page doesn't exist and usually give you a link back to the homepage of the site.
For example, here's Amazon's:

One additional step you can also carry out is to ensure that permanently moved content has a 301 HTTP server redirect set up (and don't use 'Meta refresh code in your web page)
Note: This hint is courtesy of the great O'Reilly book 'The Art of SEO' I am currently reading for review on the subject