Updating Your Website? Don’t Forget …

When you are updating your website add permanent redirects (HTTP 301) for any pages you have moved/renamed to preserve search engine ranking.

Updating Your Website? Don’t Forget …

If you are updating your website, here a couple of things you want to make sure you do:

• Add Google Analytics to your new pages.
• Add permanent redirects (HTTP 301) for any pages you have moved/renamed to preserve search engine ranking.
• View your website on multiple browsers (at least the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox).
• Run Website Grader to get a short fix-it list for things you may have overlooked.
• Run a spell check on any pages you have added or updated; we use spellr.us.

Update Nov-17-2009 Andy Wright of Elevensoft suggests “I’d also check for broken links and check that your markup is valid.” Two good suggestions which prompt me to add

• Google’s Webmaster Tools offer a number of good checks: in particular the “Crawl Errors” and “HTML Suggestions” diagnostics. Like Google Analytics it’s free.

Update Nov-20-2009: Colin Warwick suggests “Xenu’s Link Sleuth is another good broken link checker. It’s an app that you install.”

Update Mar-2-2026: it’s amazing to me how many people update a website after 5, 10, or 20 years and break all of the links to their pages and posts. They are incinerating hard won SEO work for want of some small additional effort. It has a terrible effect on ranking and loses traffic from inbound links. Dave Snowden has done this twice on his site, and when Peter Cohan rebranded Second Derivative as Great Demo he broke all of the links except for a home page redirect.  It’s malpractice on the part of the incoming web team.