By redirecting correctly, you’ll be able to migrate smoothly, but you need to know of the processes and the rules of redirection. Here, we’ll discuss that and how to set up your URLs successfully.

Migrations are important since they avoid redirection errors, and migration is usually from moving from one point of the site to another.

One example of migration is the CMS moving and the URL format, where it can be typing in a URL, and it doesn’t take you to where you want to go, simply because it might be dated or something.

If you change the CMS, sometimes you’ll have more flexibility. If your URLs are structured, you can move it to post or something similar, and moving URLS around will help improve structure and migration.

Also, look at the keywords that you use. Sometimes keywordy or dated URLs can be changed to make them shorter or cleaner, better for humans to read.

Another way to improve this is a content overhaul. If you have a client that comes to you, and you see that their content isn’t giving them the traffic and rankings that they want, sometimes a content audit works, but usually looking at the pages that are redundant, stronger together, and those that don’t serve a purpose, you can filter this out. Sometimes even merging the USL, moving pages about, or dropping them completely will help with this. It can affect how your pages rank, and you want to make sure that you’re doing all of this.

Mistakes do happen with redirects, and if you aren’t touching on this or fixing it, you’re going to have a bad time. For example, unclear ownership does happen if you’re on a bad team or a smaller one that doesn’t know how to handle this. There are situations where the tech will say they can do it, and then they don’t. If it gets dropped, then you can’t take responsibility.

Another reason why this happens is deadlines. Internal and external ones are a big part of this, and sometimes, you may focus on one part of it, but not the other five pages that need redirects, resulting in the migration happening for a singular site, but not for others.

You need to realize that redirects need to be one to one, and not have them go to three pages, but literally just one to one. You should link the URL to one singular location for every single one to one.

With this as well, watch out for loops and redirect chains. You should keep them anywhere from 3-5, and make sure that they aren’t looping back and forth.

Redirects affect your page speed and rankings, and you need to make sure that you can migrate around to the site in an effective manner. By making sure that you’re tacking these aspects, you’ll be able to improve the SEO of the site and help it rank in a more effective manner too.