Before you relaunch remember these hints

Ecommerce is now at a time when many sites are likely to be relaunching, updating to new technology and keeping up with customer expectations. Relaunching is in many ways more stressful that putting up a brand new site especially in respect of your SEO campaign. New technology almost always means a total restructuring of the the sitemap but you don't want to lose the pagerank assigned to your site's old URLs.

Below is a list of 5 tasks that must be performed to retain all the effectiveness of your SEO campaign when relaunching.

Create 301 redirects.

301 redirects are the main way to ensure that you do not lose the pagerank of your old site, and that existing rank is channelled into the correct new pages.



Update your robots.txt and sitemap
Its basic but necessary. The robots.txt file and the sitemap must both be updated to reflect the new structure  of the site and help the search engines build up a correct picture of the new structure of the site.



Keep an eye on the server logs
Check that you aren't getting any 404 errors after the relaunch, they could indicate a URL that should be covered by a 301 but has been missed. if any 404's show up they should be checked immediately.



Run ranking reports
Because you have changed all your URLs its a great idea to rerun any report that is driven by the site structure.



Check the bounce rates
As an immediate check of how effectively your relaunch has been check that the bounce rates of your site haven't risen dramatically. If they have then keep an eye on them, it could be an adverse reaction to something in your site that could negate all your hard work to keep SEO campaign effective.