Without a doubt, building any site requires one to be careful about SEO management. This is for the simple reason that it improves site visibility.
Yet ever so often, this vital aspect is overlooked, thanks to a lack of collaboration with teams. Here are 3 tips to help you with both migrations as well as new site development:
1: Manage redirects
Redirects are a common practice if a page has been moved, deleted or even domains have been migrated altogether. If you don’t have the right redirects in place, the visibility of the site on search engines can fall. It’s preferable that you use 302 redirects when you permanently move a page. Ensure that you avoid multiple redirects in a chain since this will slow down the delivery of a page. Also, if the chain is more than five, search engines will not index the page regularly.
2: Block staging servers
This is an issue that occurs during development and when during the staging versions of a site. Worse still, they can be the most vulnerable regions of the site since they test landings pages as well. If you do not have access controls in place, search engines will index these pages. This can result in duplication apart from a drop in ranking. It’s a good idea to have a password protected login page or including a robots.txt file at the root of the development server. You can also specify the IP range that restricts access and blocks spiders too.
3: Don’t Forget Mobile
With the number of mobile users accessing the internet exceeding that of PC user, it will be a bad idea to ignore this mobile audience when planning or migrating a site. In fact, Google has already developed a new algorithm to keep up with this trend too. No matter what, it’s a good idea to design a site for the smallest screen and work on enhancement for the desktop version of the site.