Redirects
- Redirects can be found at: Dashboard / Settings / EPS 301 Redirect
- here are some examples.
- These tell Google that the page has permanently moved.
- They also take visitor to the right page.
- astronomy/astronomy.html ⇒ astronomy.html
- (the latter is a more popular link. same content)
- astronomy/schedule.html ⇒ astronomy/schedule
- (same reason)
- hiking/sunday-hikes ⇒ hiking/sunday-hikes.html
- (same reason)
Strategy for the Move to WordPress
- Disturb as little as possible.
- It’s very hard to figure out why we lose search position, so it’s best to keep as much as possible the same when we switch to WordPress. Then we can change one thing at a time, and see how it goes.
- Keep URLs the same
- Keep HTML page titles (<title>) the same or fill them in, or make very obvious improvements.
- It’s very hard to figure out why we lose search position, so it’s best to keep as much as possible the same when we switch to WordPress. Then we can change one thing at a time, and see how it goes.
- When we switched from mttam.net to friendsofmttam.org, we lost our first-place Google listing for two primary searches: {mt tam} and {mt tamalpais}.
- A year and a half later we are still in 3rd and 4th places respectively.
- Probably due to the domain-name change and to breaking a lot of URLs, but perhaps to missing <title>s or ???
Thoughts on removing the .html from our URLs
- It would be nice.
- I can’t see that it matters at all. Very few people read them, Google doesn’t care, and it saves no work. But it looks nicer.
- If we do it, we should do it in several steps.
- Keep all pages as they are most often referenced (basically all .html) during the site move.
- Pick one page that Google gives a pretty high position to (but not the home page) and check its search rank for a week or two to establish a base line.
- Remove that .html and 301 (permanently) forward the .html version to the non-html version.
- Watch search position of both versions for a month and see that all is well.
- If so, go ahead an move the others if you like.
SEO Strategy
Search engines bring us 75% of our traffic, and most of the rest comes from links made by those who learned about us from search engines. For this two work Google (that’s 75% and the others are similar) must list us in the top 10 (at least) in their search listings for popular terms. Here’s how to help make that happen.
- Check Google Analytics to see which pages are most important.
- Goto: Behavior / Site Content / Landing pages, ad you will find roughly:
- Home page, 23%
- Loop hikes, 16%
- Maps and directions, 10%
- Camping, 8%
- Astronomy Schedule, 3.6%
- Put most of your effort into improving the top 4, especially #1, where there is a lot of room for improvement.
- Goto: Behavior / Site Content / Landing pages, ad you will find roughly: