Prioritizing SEO Items for a New Website Launch

[Gbtyne]

Hello, a beginner SEO question I'd love to hear your perspective on.

We're launching a new site and need to prioritize our SEO work. For a news site with multiple articles published daily, using RSS feeds to push stories to Google News is our top priority. Which item should we focus on next, an XML sitemap for Google, or an article directory based on our internal taxonomy that would provide backlinks for the individual posts to rank? Are XML sitemaps still relevant? Is an article directory a must-have or nice-to-have?

Appreciate any suggestions you may have!

[daniel-brooks]

Hey,

Personally, if this were me, I'd focus on making sure that traffic loss was kept to an absolute minimum when I launched. To do this, I would take a crawl of your current (live) website and get a list of all URLs and do exactly the same for your new site (dev site).

You'll want to make sure that you map out 301 permanent redirections for all of the URLs from your old website and point them to the most relevant URL on the new site. For example:

http://www.yoursite.com > Add a 301 permanent redirection that goes to > https://www.yournewsite.com

That way, you will maintain as much link equity as you can and look to maintain your traffic levels when you go live.

As well as that, make sure you complete the basics;

• Meta optimization
• Fix any broken links
• Complete an audit to check for improvements
• Image optimization

Those are just a few, but there are loads more than you can do. Check out this post from the Moz blog for some extra help.

Hope this helps?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I think Daniel already did a great job answering the question what you should be focused on around the migration itself. By to answer your question specifically. I would focus on making sure that the actual directory links + pages will be in place. Sitemaps is usually something that you build for making sure that there is support for them so you can have more insights. It's not something that can help you lead your SEO strategy, it provides insights but in itself doesn't create a ton of value compared to the other stuff that you can work on.

[Gbtyne]

Thanks, Martijn! Appreciate your time.

[Gbtyne]

Very helpful, Daniel. Thank you very much!