BlackWaterOps

Think you have read up on 301’s and how to do a Domain Name change with out losing your rank in the search engine?

Ready to make the move?  For sure?

Have you checked that the new domain doesn’t have penalties attached to it?  Are you sure you sure?

Got your 301 redirects set up correctly? Are you sure?

Google has an official “Step list” for making the move, which Matt Cutts wrote.

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

 

If you follow these directions, and don’t have any domain penalties your domain "*SHOULD* go smoothly, but what Matt doesn’t tell you is the time line, or how to check that each step was done correctly.

BlackwaterOps can help you make the move, and verify that each step is going smoothly.  Yes you can do this yourself, but be aware that if you mess it up, there is no “redo” if this goes horribly wrong, so if your site is small, follow Matt’s advice, if your business depends on it get help from a professional. 

The Analogy I like to use, is that I am more than capable of doing my on brake shoe replacements, but if I screw it up bad things will happen so I pay the money to a pro, so that nothing goes wrong.

Many SEO’s check your page quality score by looking at the code of the page by hand.

BlackwaterOps has a Google Appliance, along with access to other tools which come directly from Google.  This means you get quantifiable results.  Knowing that your Page Quality has been improved and for which keywords.

You can have the world’s greatest page about Pet Food, but if Google thinks it is a page about Grocery, Cans, Rice and Chicken, people are unlikely to find the page, even if those are key features of the product.

You need to rank for what people search for, not necessarily what the product is about.

Google expects certain words to appear on a page about “Pet Food”.  BlackwaterOps has these lists of expected words, and combined with knowledge about what makes a well constructed page, and our tools to then check that the changes we have made have the best possible Quality Score. 

We can show you before you make changes to your site how those changes will be received by Google. Which can prevent you from hurting your score, or drastically changing (for the worse) the traffic you are already getting.

In addition to our customized service, BlackwaterOps is now offering service bundles. These services are ideal for companies looking for simple solutions for basic SEO and SEM.

While many of our customers have thousands of pages to their website which require deep analysis to figure out where they can get the most return on their investment in SEO and SEM, Small Business and Start up customers often have small sites that we can easily assess what work is to be performed and begin.  Hence we are happy to announce our Small Business and Start-up packages.

Ad Pack: $1,500 You can’t rank #1 for every keyword you might want to get traffic for. This is why Google Adwords make sense for businesses of all sizes. We can help you create: Ad copy that will get only well qualified leads; Landing pages that will lower your Cost per Click; and track which keywords give you the best return on investment. $1,000 consulting $500 in Adwords buy.

Get Listed Pack: $500 Get your new domain listed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Most domains have to wait months to get listed in Google, and Yahoo. We will get your site in to the index much of the time the same day, but certainly within 5 days. Yahoo will generally take a week, and MSN can take up to a month. This package meant for professionally designed sites which have had some amount of SEO consulting done during their creation.

Get Ranked Pack: $1,000 Our team will analyze your site, make suggestions to improve its overall quality score, and help make sure when Google indexes your site that you will score well for many of the terms you are looking to capture. After your team has updated the site so that it is ready for submission to search engines we will use the same tools as the “Get Listed Pack” to jump start your placement in search engines.

Out Rank Pack: $4,500 Our team will work with you to figure out what keywords your competitors rank for, and work with your to take the necessary steps to be on the same page as they are for many of those keyword searches. This is not a comprehensive SEO Package, but it is suitable for Small business competing in local markets. This package includes all of the services from the Ad Pack, Get Listed and Get Ranked Pack.

Getting Serious Pack: $30,000 Our Team will take your existing Website up to 30 pages, and re-work it to score as high as possible with Google. Adding additional text copy where necessary, creating additional inbound links to increase the sites over all rank.

Thrive Pack: $100,000: This package includes all of the services of the getting serious pack, includes a blog post per week about the happenings in your industry on your “corporate” blog, includes a “Girl in Corporate Tee” video for inbound links and marketing on 12 Video sites, Adwords services and Press Release services to boost the buzz of your corporate brand. This package is recommended for companies looking to launch new products, rebrand their existing company, or companies changing markets.