When do I change out my meta tags after a full website revamp?
-
We're creating a new version of our entire website - look and feel is completely different, though core functionality and results are the same. Just cleaner, faster.. etc. We're doing a temp redirect to the temporary url for testing and to slow roll the release to some of our users for a more friendly approach. Eventually, the new look and feel will be under the original url.
I've researched best practices for the site transfer, including "make sure the meta tags for title and description are exactly the same".
The concern I have is that Moz Analytics is detecting a lot of errors in the existing meta tags. They're too long, have changed and become inconsistent after being passed through different hands, & some have some keyword stuffing in there.
I have plans to change them out and really clean them up... I'm just wondering, when is the best time to do that?
Since the tags are bad, should I just do it now but make sure that the old and new are matching? Or should I wait (and for how long?) after the new site is switched over and everything is on the original URL?
-
I totally misread that one. Need to lobby for better coffee in the Moz offices!
-
Thanks so much, everyone! Very helpful.
Yes-- @Ben, you were correct in your assumption. Keep them the same as the old site.
I started revamping the tags for the new site already, as you suggested, so I'll have those ready to go after everything is set and done and being indexed on the new site.
Thank you again!
-
Ben is correct in assuming that our advice around keeping meta and title tags the same means "from the old site to the new site" and not "as each other."
In general it's a best practice to leave as many things the same as you can when revamping your site. Since you're already changing a lot of stuff it is probably best to leave the meta tag changes until after the relaunch (although Ben's suggestion of beginning to write them now is a good one - that way you'll have the new tags ready to go when you are ready to switch them over).
Once the new site is launched I would wait until it is fully indexed and until you see the new pages from the site ranking instead of the old ones for their target keywords. Then, you might consider a gradual roll-out of the new tags so it's less disruptive while your site is still recovering from the relaunch. Start with pages that either don't rank well, or lost rankings when you switched - this might be a good little boost for those. Wait for those new tags to get cached, then target your high-ranking pages (being sure to retain keyword targeting in the tags even as you fix the errors). If all goes well you should see a positive impact from these changes. Hope that helps!
-
I was answering on the assumption that "exactly the same" meant "exactly the same as on my old site". Hope I got that assumption correct!
-
I'm not sure where you're seeing that the title tag and description should be exactly the same. They serve different purposes, and don't need to be the same. We have more information at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development that can help you out.
-
Working agency-side I've gone through a few of these exercises, and I'd advise doing them as soon as you have the copywriting started. META data takes a surprising length of time to create - a 65 character title tag sounds like it shouldn't take much to write, but precisely because you're so constrained it takes some thought. So when you have your sitemap and know the gist of each page, put together the META data for it.
If you're now onto deployment and its too late for that, I'd say leave it until after the roll out. You got where you are with the titles and descriptions you have - and you have plenty to worry about without adding META data!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Problems with Meta Title on Bing
On the Bing search engine, it isn't showing the actual meta title we have for a website. It's showing something different. However, the correct meta title is showing on the Google search engine. Has anyone had the same issue? Has anyone been able to fix this issue? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Harrison.Stickboy0 -
Amp version of website
Hello & thanks for reading its maybe the monday morning blues but i have two versions of a website - www.gardeners.scot and www.gardeners.scot/AMP/ the pages on the amp version have canonicals pointing to the "normal" website Should the links on "www.example.com/AMP/" point to the amp website or the normal website? what are your thougths?
Technical SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Cached version of website
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the mobile menu links are also coming in text format which looks weird. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:indialetsplay.com&biw=1366&bih=638&noj=1&strip=1 Our coder told us that he has created separate menu i.e. one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. Does the duplicating the menu good for on page SEO? Give the best solution for handling it.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Website Pop up
I want to install a pop up on my site for collecting email addresses. I use nopcommerce as my platform. I was quoted a price to custom develop it but thought there might just be a simple plugin. I can find them for wordpress but that is all. Does anybody have experience with this?
Technical SEO | | katazoom0 -
Websites that scroll....forever....
I'm seeing more and more websites that have all their content on one page. I came across www.otbthink.com today and am wondering if I'm missing something here. I ask this because I am trying to figure out how to link to their copy writing portion of their website. I have a client that is in their area and needs someone to do some copy writing work for them. All the content there is being served through css. The search engines will see it but how do you optimize for this sort of site? How do you link to a particular section of this site? Am I missing something obvious here? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Canoical tags how do i use them
Hi i have this coming up on the report for my url www.in2town.co.uk but i am not sure how to use the canonical tag. I am using joomla and would be grateful if anyone could please give me advice on how to use this. Canonical URL Tag Usage Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt> <dd>0</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.</dd> <dd>many thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
</dd> </dl>0 -
Should i Change On Page Optimization ?
Hi, PC monitoring and computer monitoring software are our targeted keywords. Around 5 weeks ago, We created a page for pc monitoring software (home/pc-monitoring-software) and did some bookmarking and guest posts targeting PC monitoring software keyword. Now we are in Top 15 on Google for PC monitoring software keyword . Initially we were thinking to change content of around 2 year old home page to adjust computer monitoring software keyword and do SEO for this keyword. But few days ago, we noticed that our pc-monitoring-software page is already ranking in early fourties for computer monitoring software keyword as well. May be Google is giving advatage of being synonym of PC . Now we are thinking that we should optimize the PC monitoring software page for both computer and PC software keywords like adding "computer monitoring software" in addition to existing "pc monitoring software" in title and similalrly do other on page related work for Computer Mnitoring Software. We are also thinking of doing 301 redirect of existing pc-monitoring-software page to new computer-monitoring-software page which will be optimized both for PC and Computer. Please suggest me if it will help to get good ranking for both PC and Computer Monitoring software if we make above mentioned changes or we should not change the existing pc-monitoring-software page and shall stick to earlier plan of changing the home page to adjust for computer monitoring software.? I'm new to SEO, so want to make wise decision with your help instead of learning with failures. Thanks, shahzad
Technical SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
How many strong tags is too many
Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many? What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards1