Don't kick yourself later for not following this advice today

URL’s

Get a list of all the existing URL’s and save a copy. You need to make sure that all your old URL’s stay the same and any new URL’s follow the same structure for consistency.

Meta Data

Make sure to save all your meta title and description tags and that you transfer them over to the appropriate pages.

Content

Save the content, even if you don’t plan on re-using it, you never know.

No Follow Tags

Remember which links have no follow tags so you can implement them in the new site.  No follow tags allow you to keep more link juice (value) on your own site.

Remember which images that may have links have no follow tags so you can implement them in the new site. i.e. BBB.org, TrustE, PayPal etc…

Analytics

Get the analytics code from the current site and put it in ALL the new pages. Once the new site is up, make sure to verify that every single page has the original analytics code. Don’t forget to add it to the Thank You Page so you can track conversions later, using Google Goals in your analytics account.

Live Chat

If you have Live Chat get the code and make sure to transfer it properly.

Site Speed

Make sure that all the optimization done for faster site speed is also done to the new site:  Google has repeatedly commented that site speed can affect the reliability of your site and, by extension, your rankings. If the search robots cannot reach your website due to technical issues—especially frequent issues—it will flag the site as an unreliable resource. Load time also affects the experience of visitors. Pages that take more than 10 seconds to load potentially lose up to 50% of visitors.

To decrease the loading time of your web pages you must minimize the number of HTTP requests made by each page. We recommend the following:

• Compile all CSS into 1 stylesheet
• Compile all Javascript into 1 JS file.
• Prevent Javascript from running before the HTML is loaded.
• Resize images to the max require dimensions so that no browser side rendering is required and image sizes are reduced.
• Fix any crawl errors represented in Google Webmaster Tools

Your website will not appear any differently once these changes are made; however, the load times will be affected positively.

301 Redirects for Duplicate URL issues

Make sure that ALL 301 redirects stay in place.  If you have mutiple instances of the same content on your site on different URL’s like the ones below, it can hurt your rankings. Make all the URL’s point to 1 with a 301 URL redirect.

For example:

www.yourdomain.com

yourdomain.com

yourdomain.com/index

www.yourdomain.com/index

should all point to one URL like www.yourdomain.com

Meta Robots

We recommend adding the following meta tag to each page of your website that relates to the SEO campaign. This meta tag instructs search engines to index the page and follow the links contained within.

The following meta robots tag should be used:
<meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” />

Image Alt Tags

Remember to transfer over all Image Alt Tags. Search engines use these alt tags to rank your photos which can drive lots of traffic.

Favicon

If you have a favicon transfer it (the little image to the left of the URL bar with your Logo or  white square if you don’t have one made yet.

NoFollow tags are simple to get the hang of and here is a basic definition of what a NoFollow tag is:

A NoFollow Tag is an HTML tag that informs search engines that they should bypass a link when they are indexing a page.

This is how a NoFollow tag looks:

rel”nofollow”

The NoFollow tag basically acts as a way of telling the search engines not to look at the link when determining the website’s ranking.

Why Use a NoFollow Tag?

The main point to using these tags is to cut back on spam. The quality of the search engine rankings will improve and spamdexing will be a thing of the past!

How Does It Work?

A wide range of search engines such as Yahoo! MSN and Google will go through web pages periodically and index any new pages that have been added to the website. All of the links on a web page are followed by the search engines and then they rank the website according to the quality of the link. Web pages that have a high number of good quality links (links that are relevant to the website, links that go to well-ranked websites etc) will be ranked higher than those with purchased links or links that are irrelevant to the website.

If you have included links in your website that you don’t want the search engines to use when ranking your website then you should use a NoFollow tag.

You can think of a NoFollow tag as offering an invisible cloak over a link that is there for another purpose other than to rank your site!

The NoFollow tag was created to cut back on spammers using links that have been paid for rather than earned and it works well overall. Creating artificial links for your website will backfire on you and organic links are the way forward and don’t ever be coerced into thinking otherwise! Some search engines will actually penalize your website ranking if they think you are using irrelevant links to boost your ranking and publishers, advertisers and spammers will be removed if they catch you using artificial links.

Some websites automatically use a NoFollow tag in the comments section to ensure that spammers don’t place links in the comments section. The amount of links generated by blog comments was the original reason that NoFollow tags were created. The idea behind it was that when spammers use blogs to comment on to create links to boost their SEO campaign, NoFollow would ensure that it wouldn’t allow these links to work.

NoFollow is used for many purposes and even popular sites such as Wikipedia use NoFollow for all of their external links while search gurus Google advise all websites to use NoFollow for their paid links.

How useful do you find NoFollow?

An interesting article was posted over at NeuroScienceMarketing about changing behavior with Fun.

Here’s a video demonstrating:

Changing Behavior with Fun

How can your company make purchasing or using your products and services fun?

Videos can be a huge benefit to a business and YouTube is the world’s most popular video-posting network so it should come as little surprise that there are ways to produce links from your YouTube postings!

YouTube is home to a range of different videos from promotional clips through to funny home videos and using videos to gain backlinks to your website is genius! (sidenote: YouTube is the second biggest search engine by traffic) You can embed your YouTube video all over the internet in order to create new links and here’s how:

The Problem?

Currently, the main problem with getting links from your YouTube video is that when you embed your clip you can link back to the YouTube page where your video can be seen but nowhere else. This means that there is no link to your actual site, which is of little help to you if you are using YouTube for marketing purposes.

The Solution…

Luckily, there is a way around this problem!

• Firstly, take the embed code from the YouTube video
• Then at the beginning and the end of the code place paragraph HTML tags
• Where you see the closing object tag simply add a line break tag
• Then after the break tag you need to enter text that describes what the clip is about
• Then write your target URL and link code

The idea is that it will look something like the following:

<p><object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”640″ height=”385″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”src” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5_sfnQDr1-o?fs=1&amp;hl=en_GB” /><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”640″ height=”385″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5_sfnQDr1-o?fs=1&amp;hl=en_GB” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object><br />Funny Video <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/user/YourUSERNAME”>Your USERNAME</a></p>

If this code needs to be copied then you can put a <text area element with javascript that will highlight all of the text when you click on a part of the text.

i.e.

<textarea onclick=”this.focus(); this.select();”> </textarea>

Then you should go to the textarea code and put the HTML for your YouTube video clip where you have to replace the following:

• < characters with &It;
• > characters with &gt;

This works because the page gets read as if it is plain HTML…

It’s fairly easy to do if you follow these clear instructions and with video being so widely used by businesses in an attempt to promote their sales; the benefits to providing links are easy to see. Many people steer clear of using YouTube as a way of advertising their company as without the inclusion of links many thought it was a waste of time and effort. Now you know how to create links to your own websites through YouTube, will you use YouTube more to boost your business?

Also, how often do you use YouTube as a promotional way of marketing a product or service?