How to move to a new domain without hurting SEO

Why move to a new domain?

If the domain you have now is not the one you wanted – if it’s long, with hyphens and says nothing about your brand – then you might consider registering a new web address that’s not only catchier but also more relevant to your brand.

1. Register your new domain

2. Upload a “coming soon” page

Create a ‘coming soon’ page on your new domain a few weeks before moving everything from your old domain to the new one to allow search engines to crawl and index your new website.

3. Upload your pages to the new domain

Now you need to upload all the files from your old website to your new one.

4.  301 Redirect to keep rankings

A search engine friendly 301 Redirect (Moved Permanently) will not only send visitors to the correct page but will also tell search engines that the page has permanently moved. A 301 direct will thus transfer domain authority, visitors and also your rankings in Google, and can be used to consolidate link equity content within a site to provide a better end user experience.

These 301 redirects should be done for individual pages meaning that each page on the old site should be redirected to the new URL on the new domain.

5. Tell Google you moved

Another important thing you need to do is let Google know that your old website has been transferred to a new web address. To do that, you can use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Console. This works at site level, letting Google know that you’ve transferred the entire domain and not just certain pages.

After you’ve moved to a new gTLD, you need to monitor everything to ensure you’ve redirected everything properly so you don’t lose any referring traffic or PageRank that’s coming from old backlinks. Keep checking google webmaster tools for any missed redirect pages.

Pagination for SEO

with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

From an SEO perspective, pagination can cause serious issues with Google’s ability to index your site’s content.

To ease things when a robot read your page2, you may mention page 1 & 3 using below tags in head.

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.site.com/page1.html">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.site.com/page3.html">

Detailed info

SMO = Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization is becoming an increasingly important factor in search engine optimization, as search engines are increasingly utilizing the recommendations of users of social networks such as Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ to rank pages in the search engine result pages. The implication is that when a webpage is shared or "liked" by a user on a social network, it counts as a "vote" for that webpage's quality.

When used effectively social media can be one of your greatest assets for improving your site’s organic search results. By connecting with people in various online venues, you extend the reach of your business and increase opportunities for people to link to your main business page. Social media optimization helps connect all of your social media accounts in a cohesive, consistently branded network that points your potential customers where you want them to go.

Rules Of Social Media Optimization:

• Focus audience - Checking your analytics to see what days and times your fans are most likely to read and interact with your posts. Focusing on using post formats your audience prefers, such as images versus videos.
• Create shareable content – The better your content is, the more people will want to share it with their entire social networks whether they link it, like it or share it.
• Make sharing easy – Once you have shareable content, it has to be one-button-easy so people will do it with minimal effort or thinking.
• Reward engagement – Today the real goal is around conversation or engagement – this is the behaviour that matters most in the social web and the one that we should all focus on rewarding when it happens.

Here are  social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

1. howsociable.com – Social visibility score
2. knowem.com – Profile building tool
3. Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
4. semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
5. Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
6. Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
7. majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
8. socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
9. bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
10. analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics