REDIRECTS

Number four is redirects. This is something that everyone should do and should get into a habit of redirect. So what you can do is go to the optimised tab, and in here we've got redirects. Now with redirects, it might be that on your old website, it was called about-us, and your new website, you've changed it to just simply about. So what would we do in that instance? Because if that webpage is on the search engine somewhere, it's still going to be on the search engines about-us. So we're going to redirect it to about. So we can go over to the redirects here and we can put what's the old path, put in the forwards slash, and we're going to type in about us. And then I'm going to put in the new path here, redirect to about, press save. And now we've got our first redirect setup. So you can build a whole list of redirects here. But my advice for SEO is first preserve and then enhance.

Well, what do I mean by that? Well, if a page is ranking well, you want to preserve it. So you want to preserve the URL and you want to preserve the content and then you can enhance that content over time. So if it was me and I had this situation as a old URL, which was about-as, I'd probably keep that URL the same and keep it about-us. So if that's your basic strategy, always think first preserve and then enhance , and then you're only changing those essential pages that you have to change or that you need to as part of your marketing plan and structure. So that's a top tip there. First preserve and then enhance. And if you do this, the migration process from the old website to the new website will go well because years ago we really had to focus a lot on site migrations, but these days Google knows anyway. So as long as you keeping those URLs the same and the copy is quite similar in most regards, then you're going to be just fine.