Every organization that has a web presence and leverages it to get clients understands the importance of a website. Their website is like a holy grail to them, their temple which they visit every single day. Now, Every business also has a seasonality aspect attached to it.

An organization which arranges “summer camp” throughout the state will add a lot of jazz to its website just as summer begins. Their marketing whizkids will come up with deals, special offers and wide range of camping trips to lure parents into sending their kids for their camps. Of course, this means that a lot of new web pages (about camping at new places) will be added and a lot of old pages will be deleted from the website. The homepage of course will be revamped as well.

Web designers are on a roll and the managers are busy with.. well managing. A lot of organizations that hire in house SEO’s fail to understand the involvement of an optimizer from the beginning of a new campaign launch.

Dedicated to all you Search Engine Optimizer’s: How to come out of a new campaign launch with five stars?

Before the new webpages go live:

• Be in touch with the designer. Yes, all you search engine optimizers out there should learn and understand this. Not all designers are user interface experts and many of them need guidance on designing a user friendly site. Help them understand the important of a beautifully designed and strategically placed call to action button.

• Catch hold of the front end developer and be good to him/her. If you don’t know HTML and CSS, you have got to be on your best behavior with them. Guide the developer on creating a seo friendly HTML code. Not all organizations have designers and developers who understand SEO.A lot of this matters because it helps you plan your future steps. E.g.
  
  1. Use heading tag instead of increasing the size of normal text and making it bold.
  
  2. If the images should be placed in the code or should be called from the stylesheet.
  
  3. Oh, before I forget, URL Structure. It won’t take you more than ten to fifteen minutes to explain the ideal URL structure for the website.

• Find out where the content writer sits and instill the fear of Google Panda in them. Ok, I am just kidding. But you get the point, don’t you?

• While the designer, developer and content writer start with their work, You can make a list of all the
  
  1. New URL’s in the website. Use an excel sheet and maintain this data.
  
  2. Old URL’s that have to be redirected to a new URL.
  
  3. URL’s that don’t have to be indexed by the search engines. E.g. pop ups etc.

• Open the sitemap.xml file; Add the new URL’s and delete the old ones

• Robots.txt: Add the URL’s from point 4c. OR Add a “NOINDEX” metatag in the head section of the webpage.

• HTACCESS FILE: add all the 301 redirects.

• After the site is coded and ready, make sure it contains
  
  1. The Analytics and other tracking codes which are already present in all the other pages.
  
  2. Google/Bing webmaster verification meta tag if any (in revamped homepage)

• Perform on page optimization activities.

After the webpages go live:

• MOST IMPORTANT: check if the site is working fine & all the 301 redirects are working.

• Test your website in all available browsers. Do not ignore this one.

• Check the sitemap.xml file to see if it is updated.

• Check the robots.txt file.

• Check analytics & other tracking websites to ensure that your website details are getting recorded.

• Check the broken links in your website. Use the XENU tool. It’s absolutely free and works great.

• Keep track of site performance issues. Use “page speed” addon in Firefox and Chrome for the same.

With all the above ticked, you can take a good night’s sleep because your major chunk of work is done. Now wait for your site to get crawled, indexed and another round of tasks begin. Till then adios amigos. If I have missed out on any point, do let me know.