When you make major redesigning on your WordPress websites, you might have to remove some of the old and irrelevant posts. However, you will still want to retain the organic visitors coming to the old posts, so that you will not have to lose out on the valuable traffic that you are getting on those pages.
The best solution for preserving the link equity of old posts is by using the WordPress redirect option. If you implement your redirect strategies properly, then your visitors will hardly notice any change, when they are taken to a new destination page.
The loss of traffic can be minimized by getting the redirects done the right way. That way you can ensure that the SEO ranking of those pages will not take a hit. On the other hand, if you make mistakes while using the WordPress redirect, then there are chances of losing out on the page rankings that you had earned over the years.
Homepage URL:
People type website URLs in many different ways. Sometimes they my type www.yourwebsite.net and sometimes they might type http://yourwebsite.net. Well, both of these variations are legitimate, but your SEO focus might be on one of those variations.
Both of the variations will work equally well on the browsers, but it can create a big issue to your SEO strategies. The browsers will not know which of the variations to accept, which is why they will accept all the variations.
In order to avoid this from happening, you must use the redirect option to the page on which your SEO strategies are focused upon. That way, you can ensure that all the URL query variations of the homepage, will lead to the main URL page, which you use for your internet marketing requirements.
Maintain the file naming structure to avoid confusions:
If you are doing a site migration, then make sure that you use the URL structure according to the old one. If the page URL was http://www.oldsite.net/FAQ, then make sure that you use similar file structure on your new domain as well, which is http://www.newsite.net/FAQ. It will make it easy for the search engines to index your new pages that are redirected from the old ones. It also allows you to easily develop the sitemap for your new domain, without creating any confusion.
If the loading of any of your old web pages is getting delayed because of bulky images, then you can use any of the free image resize software to create a new page with resized images. Then you can redirect the visitors to the new page, as it will help in improving the user experience of your website.
301 redirect:
There are different types of redirects, but the most important one for SEO strategies is the 301 redirect. Not only does it take the visitors to the new page without them knowing about it, even the search engines will crawl to the new page as well.
The best advantage of using 301 Redirect is that most of the SEO equity of the old page will get rewarded to the new destination page. You can easily do the redirects by using the free WP redirect plugin.
