If you feel like you “grew out” of your existing CMS, migration can be the only suitable way to revive your website potential. It’s great that you are ready to step forward and try yourself on the new stage, no matter what platform you’ve chosen. But before putting the CMS migration into motion, it’s vital to look through the guide to ensure that no nasty SEO risks are willing to put in danger the whole web project.
SEO Risks?! Wait, what? That’s right, there may be some parts of your ex-website that you won’t be able to preserve…or will you? If you do everything right according to this article, the whole SEO juice you’ve been collecting thoroughly, piece by piece, will be safe and sound within your fresh site. Let’s get it started then.
First aid kit: 301 Redirect
The process of switching platforms includes the link transformation. It is unavoidable since each platform has its own approach to link creation. It doesn’t matter if you stay on the same domain or “move” to another one, you won’t omit the URLs being changed. And that’s the part when 301 Redirect stands out from the shadow ready to save your rankings.
How does it work? The name of this option says for itself: it redirects both users and search bots to your new link when they happen to click on your old one. And moreover, it informs crawlers that the old pages are not missing, but just moved. Believe me when I say that it’s better to be classified as “changed,” but not “new.”
So if you’ve ever considered moving your website to WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, but were terrified by the SEO development scenarios, include 301 Redirect option in your migration “to do” list. To enable it to save the precious SEO juice, first download the right plugin, extension or module and then tick on the corresponding box in the Migration Wizard while choosing the additional options. You can find out more about 301 Redirect right in this article, leaving absolutely no questions unanswered.
Leave Google the chance to find you
Metadata is another vital thing not to lose when moving house. Every piece of it gives a user the answers to the most famous W questions: where, who, what, when, why. It’s like a summary of everything that your website includes.
Metadata which contains keywords, called metatags, is the diamond for your SEO jewelry box. While searching the pages to put on its rating list, Google pays attention to those meta tags. Though some might say that now their value is overestimated, they are still capable of encouraging more and more users to click on your links.
The second most important piece of metadata is title tags. Who would have thought, right? But apparently, the names of your articles or posts are the red flags for search engines. If you have the “right” title, you get an invitation to become a member of a closed first-page club. And vice versa, be ready to be judged by your “cover” if you don’t have a solid grasp of its relevance.
The useful parts for your SEO score also include image texts, alt attributes, and mobile metadata. You can easily transfer all pieces of these described above notions if you tick on the appropriate box in the additional options section while migrating your CMS.
Final words
Nevertheless, there may appear some gaps in your SEO rating even if you followed all the instructions, and that is normal. Because, let’s say it honestly, moving to a new platform was a bit risky but a worthy idea from the very beginning. The same goes with applying for a new job or choosing the new path for jogging: it is just-out so that it won’t go the same way. But anytime you’d feel like giving up, recollect the very reason why you’ve decided to migrate: it was high time for changes.
If there are still some people who didn’t give migration a try but always wanted to, don’t wait up, hesitators, you may be losing your minutes of glory right now staying on the same level. Set your migration into motion with the help of CMS2CMS service and enjoy your happily ever after.