content audits for seo & site migration: picking a website up on your back and moving it

Bill Slawski

Go Fish Digital

Tysons Corner Search Engine Marketing Meetup

December 10, 2013

Content Audits for SEO & Site Migration: Picking a Website Up

On Your Back and Moving It.

“What ever you are creating – be it a design, a product or a painting, if you wish it be successful, never forget that you are creating it for the benefit or the use of people.”

- Ron Wayne, Co-Founder of Apple Computers- http://p.barker.dj/applefounder

Understand changes/pain points Anticipate changesUse Helpful ToolsDon’t transport unneeded assetsExplore changes before a final moveElicit Feedback

Lessons Covered in This Presentation

In 2003, I was part of a team charged with moving a busy public building 5 blocks down the street

Architecture as an Analogy

Moving Frightened Us

The move ended

up going well, but

the planning

behind it reminds

me of the

planning that

goes into moving

a website to a

new domain, or

moving it in

rankings in

search engines in

significant ways.

Why We Moved the Court

There were a

number of pain

points that forced

us to move,

including no room

for growth,

inadequate

electrical

systems, unsafe

transportation of

defendants, little

storage room.

We were moving into a building with Family Court!

While we were the

highest level trial

Court in the State,

one of our biggest

concerns about the

move was that we

would be in the same

building with Family

Court, where cases

involving custody

and visitation issues

were highly

emotionally charged.

Unfortunately, that

concern ended up

being warranted.

The Key to a Successful Move was Careful Planning

Audit all your (Digital) Assets – Decide what stays, what moves, what gets changed or upgraded.

Don’t Transport Unneeded Assets

Test Changes in a Safe Environment

E-Courtroom was set up and tested in Old Court House

Field Trip to Annapolis Maryland Court House where the first Audio Digital Courtrooms where

set up court wide

Learn from Others

Elicit Input from Everyone

Know your audiences, listen to them, find out what they really need and try to improve things for everyone

Header Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

Often for a quick check on error handling (404) and Canonicalization (301) re: subdomains

Xenu Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Check Broken Links, Redirects, and SiteStructure

Screaming Frog Web Crawler

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

I like this program because it makes it very easy to create a multi-sheet contentInventory for a site, to track different digital assets

DeepCrawl

http://deepcrawl.co.uk/

An Enterprise levelCrawler with an EnterpriseLevel price tag. It makes bigger sites easily manageable.

Builtwith

http://builtwith.com/

Allows for a quick lookinto the technologiesused on a site

Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Provides suggestions on issues to help speed upa site and information on how to make those changes

Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Make sure thatSchema Meta DataIs set up correctly

Image SEO

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/alt/

Check File Name,Image Size, and Alt Text quickly

Web Developer Toolbar

http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Swiss Army Knife of Tools – lets you view pages without images, without CSS, without cookies, and view different elements on a page as overlays

Google Webmaster Tools

Allows Access to data about a sitethat can’t be retrieved elsewhere

You see a Courthouse – I see a Challenge

Bill SlawskiTwitter: @bill_slawskiBlog: http://www.seobythesea.comSite: http://gofishdigital.com/LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/slawskiGooglePlus:

https://plus.google.com/+BillSlawski/

Thank You