04 Jun More Strategic Web Marketing Mistakes when Designing your Website
Continuing our discussion from the previous post about strategic web marketing mistakes when you are designing or redesigning your website, we get into some mistakes a lot of folks make when getting their website going.
Not setting up 301 redirects
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. Whether you’re switching domain names, restructuring your URLs (more on that in the next section), or consolidating content as part of your website redesign, setting up 301 redirects is crucial to ensuring any “SEO juice” from your old URLs gets transferred to your new URLs.
Here’s an example. Let’s say your current site has a “Team” page (at yoursite.com/team), as well as a “Culture” page (at yoursite.com/culture). However, as part of your website redesign, you want to consolidate the content from those two pages into a single “About Us” page (at yoursite.com/about). To transfer the SEO authority of those pages to your new page, you’ll want to set up 301 redirects so that yoursite.com/team and yoursite.com/culture both send folks to the new URL, yoursite.com/about.
Failure to set up 301 redirects for pages you move or delete can result in a drop in rankings as well as an influx in 404 (a.k.a. “Page Not Found”) error messages for your site’s visitors.