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21 April 2011 09:34am
Hi
I work for a large site in the travel area. We are in the process of relaunching a brand new version of the site including front end and back end.
My question is about content migration of the existing site to the new one.
What is the best approach in order not to loose any organic traffic (or even improve it) and make sure that we take this as an opportunity to review the site architecture so we optimise user experience. Is there any best practise ressource anywhere?
My approach is to start with SEO keyword analysis to identify what our users are searching for and articulate the content around it.
Any comments, ressources welcome.
CEO at Econsultancy
27 April 2011 11:29am
Hi there
You ask a couple of different questions there I think.
One of your questions seems to be 'what should our content (and information architecture) be?' and the other is 'how do we migrate existing content into a new IA without losing, or improving, our search rankings'?
The first question would require a long answer but I certainly wouldn't do it based on keywords/search alone. You can take this as an input but, fundamentally, you should find out what your customers would want/expect from you and focus on that.
On the second question you can read through out site migration experience at http://ecly.co/gUikpD but, essentially, you need to 301 redirect your old URLs to their new version and the rankings should stay the same. You might be able to improve your rankings, with existing content once migrated via:
- Better formed URLs (if your current ones aren't good)
- Better internal linking and architecture (through navigation, site maps, tags etc.)
Obviously you should also read our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Best Practice Guide - http://ecly.co/hpiKV2