SEO: Planning For Change - Search Engine Optimization Advice for President Obama’s Online Home at Whitehouse.gov
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Written By Dan Kashman | January 21, 2009 | Share This
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The day after what was arguably the most significant inauguration of a United States President in our lifetime, I thought it only right to address a topic that is on everyone’s mind, though few are talking about. Of course I mean search engine optimization.
Ok, so maybe very few are thinking about SEO today, but herein lies the problem. It is often during these great moments of change that an organization’s disregard for search engine optimization (SEO) can result in devastating losses in the search equity they may have built up over many years.
In light of this there are a few lessons that all organizations can learn from the whitehouse.gov redesign and the importance of preparing for change from a search engine optimization perspective.
As Reprise Media’s Community Manager Austin Bryan pointed out to me, it was a wonderful symbolic gesture for the new White House web team to remove all of the robots.txt coding that had made much of the site invisible to search engines. It’s a dramatic change but was it one that the site had been fully prepared for?
In simply looking at links from Google to whitehouse.gov we can see that change has come, but not without a price. Out of the first 20 links on Google, there are 6 issues leading to either a broken page or 404 error page (this translates to a 30% rate of ineffective change management).
To be fair other parts of the site have been handled well with redirects up and running for the first lady and VP sections of the site.
Still, whether you are preparing to take the oath of office or redesign your website, here are two key points of advice:
Appoint a Transition Team: Like all good online marketing strategies, having a team of qualified domain experts on your side developing and executing on the transition plan will ensure that you are taking advantage of the great awareness and traffic generating power of the web. This team will be on the look-out for all of the potential search marketing pitfalls of a redesigned site, such as lost links and duplicate content- both of which can significantly impact your ability to generate traffic from natural search.
Set up Your Change of Address: You don’t want Netflix to send The Departed to your old mailing address when you move into the White House. Similarly, when you remove pages from your website which were previously indexed by search engines, make sure to properly redirect those pages. A 301 redirect to the new content that most closely relates to those removed pages should do nicely. Much like a permanent change of address at the post office, this will automatically direct visitors to the new address for that page.
A good example of this missed opportunity was seen at www.whitehouse.gov/news. Though fixed now, this link redirected users to a 404 error page for much of today, which in addition to being a bad visitor experience means that all of the valuable links on other sites (which help natural search visibility) are being squandered. Left as is, the search engines would just drop this page from their listings, meaning you have one less opportunity to direct that interested searcher to your site.
These are only two of the many considerations that site owners and marketers need to consider when renovating their online home. While most brands are starting to take notice of search engine optimization early in the redesign process, unfortunately what we see at whitehouse.gov is more the rule than the exception.
Ideally much of the work in SEO takes place long before your new site goes live and if done right, should be virtually invisible to the visitor. For marketers who are investing heavily in their digital properties, making SEO a priority from the outset will ensure many more visitors will be able to find your site through a search engine. Since search engines are the number one source of traffic on the Internet, that’s change we all can believe in.
Topics: SEO |
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It was a great article. It is really important to make a change in the online home with regards to SEO in order to prevent broken pages or 404 error page.
I could not agree any less…An effective SEO campaign should start with your website being able to get noticed and ranked high.