Referred Link - https://www.godaddy.com/garage/best-practices-for-protecting-your-website-seo-in-a-redesign
I’ve been working with website SEO for 15 years, and I’ve run a WordPress design agency for nine years. Over that time, I’ve learned one thing that stands out more than any other — a bad website design project can kill your SEO, search ranking, and traffic like no other. That statement might seem fairly overly dramatic, but trust me when I say that I am not exaggerating. Website owners and marketers simply do not realize how easy it is to lose their website SEO in a redesign.
To illustrate my point, I’d like to provide some comments from real people who have reached out to me. These have all arrived through the inquiry form on my website.
This is just a sampling of the horror stories I hear each month:
- I’ve made lots of changes to the site since late 2016, and clearly not all of them were good; traffic has completely nosedived to where I’m currently at less than 1 percent of what I achieved in my peak (1300 monthly views vs 170,000). I’d love some help regaining my search traffic again. – Emma
- We worked with a company to transfer our website over from the Drupal platform to the WordPress platform. The structure of the website seems to be like twigs scotch taped together. Most damaging has been our significant drop in lead contact form submissions. So, we’re trying to find out why our leads dropped so much, and what we can do to start getting more of them. – Michael
- Goal of my current SEO campaign: get more traffic. Since converting from my old site, my traffic has dropped significantly to almost zero. – John
- My traffic has gone down over 70 percent in the last few months. I hired a tech company last summer who supposedly were SEO experts and my traffic started decreasing in August. It went down a bit but by the end of November/December, it had gone down a ton. – Candace
- We had the site down for a little over a week while she migrated the content over to a new theme, but now that it is back up, our traffic is basically at zero (we usually get thousands of views a day). – Ivy
- I hired a company last year to redesign our website and the new site launched in December 2017. Here’s the problem: in the first month following the launch, organic traffic dropped 40%! It has been over two months and our traffic hasn’t really recovered. – Rima
See any trends there? Each website owner had high hopes of being able to improve their website, while also maintaining or improving their SEO. And yet, it didn’t happen. Just the opposite. The botched redesign had a horrible outcome.
So, what really did happen? How did each of these website owners lose their SEO in a simple redesign?
Top 10 reasons website SEO and traffic disappear after a redesign
Here are some common reasons you could see your SEO rankings and traffic decrease or disappear after a website redesign:
Developer forgot to remove the noindex flag upon go-live of the new website.
Minimalist design went a bit too far and SEO-friendly content was removed.
The website URL structure was modified but 301 redirects were not used.
Keyword focused content was lost in an effort to make the website more visual.
Meta titles, meta descriptions, or H1 headers were hardcoded to be the same across the entire website.
Content silos were removed in an effort to flatten the website and provide a leaner approach to content marketing.
The content migration forgot to consider existing internal links and failed to build in a new internal linking strategy.
Key SEO pages were reduced down and placed into in content tabs.
JavaScript was put into place, but not validated for errors. As a result, unknown errors would prevent Google from successfully crawling and rendering pages.
The mobile website failed to follow Google’s best practices for mobile-first indexing.
You can protect yourself from the above issues. As a website owner, you cannot fully depend on your designer or developer’s SEO knowledge.
I’ve learned that some designers and developers just don’t know what they don’t know.
Their intentions are pure and genuine, but their lack of website SEO knowledge is dangerous.
Follow a website redesign checklist
Below is my recommended list of activities for protecting you and your website through a redesign process.
Website design and development
To protect your website SEO in a redesign, check these boxes in the design and development category:
- Set up a development website as noindex.
- Take it one step further by blocking access to the site via a server level user ID and password.
- Use Dyno Mapper or Screaming Frog to crawl the existing website to obtain a complete URL list.
- Review Google Search Console or SEMrush so you can document a list of your top SEO-based landing pages.
- Map targeted keywords to specific URLs and create an SEO sitemap.
- Review content silos and validate that proper parent/children relationships exist.
- Update outdated content and work towards a minimum length of 1,000 words.
- Proofread new content for spelling errors and grammar.
- Style new content for readability (i.e., small paragraphs, subheaders, bullets).
- Review all content and create proper meta titles and descriptions.
- Double check top landing pages to validate that quality content and SEO is in place.
- Validate that search engine friendly URLs are in place.
- Review your Semantic SEO header and make sure a proper outline structure exists for search engines and human visitors.
- Check your website across mobile devices to confirm that responsive design and coding is in place and working properly.
- Validate template coding to W3 standards and pay close attention to JavaScript issues.
- Ensure your website passes Google’s mobile-friendly test.
- Ensure your website passes accessibility tests.
- Check code to text ratio on live pages to make sure search engines are not having to stumble through oodles of code and styling overrides to get to your valuable SEO content.
- Check and validate Schema usage within Structured Data.
- Check images for proper usage of alt text.
- Optimize images for load times.
- Update internal links to accommodate the new URL structure.
- Create 301 redirects for any URL changes to existing content.
- Check for redirect loops and chains.
- Create a new XML sitemap.
- Check the Robots.txt file and validate.
Next …
Website go-live
When your redesigned website goes live:
- Remove the noindex setting on the live site.
- Scan the database for any development URLs, and if found, update the URLs to the live site structure.
- Review Google Analytics goals to validate that the URL structure and flow match the new website.
- Upload the new XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Check Google Search Console for any crawl errors and address as needed.
- Use SEMrush to crawl the new website and report errors.
Conclusion: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
As with many things in life, you are much better off spending time preventing issues than trying to fix them once they occur. Website SEO absolutely falls under this thought process.
You can protect and improve your SEO in a website redesign, but you have to make sure you and your developer are focused on SEO from the start of graphic design all the way through to the end of development and go-live.
Referred Link - https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/ten-sentences-with-all-the-scrum-master-advice-youll-ever-need
1. Never Commit the Team to Anything Without Consulting Them First
As the Scrum Master, you do not have the authority to accept change requests (no matter how small) on behalf of the team. Even if you are absolutely positive that the team can fulfill a request, say, “I need to run this by the team before we can say yes.”
And certainly don’t commit the team to deadlines, deliverables, or anything else without first talking to team members. You may not need to talk to the whole team--plenty of teams will allow some or all members to say, “Yeah, we can do that” without a whole-team meeting. But it’s still their decision, not yours.
2. Remember You’re There to Help The Team Look Good
Being a Scrum Master is not about making yourself look good. You look good when the team looks good. And they look good when they do great work.
You know you’re doing your job well when those outside the team start to wonder if you were even needed. Yes, it can be scary if your boss wonders if you’re necessary. But a good boss will know that your skill and expertise make you appear unnecessary when in fact you are indispensable.
Trust your manager to understand the difference between looking unneeded and being unneeded.
3. Don't Beat the Team over the Head with an Agile Rule Book
Neither Scrum nor agile comes with a rule book (though some have attempted to create one).
If your product has users, consider writing user stories. But stories aren’t required to be agile. If someone needs to know when you’ll deliver: estimate. If not, maybe you don’t. If you think an end-of-sprint review is too late to receive feedback, do one-at-a-time reviews as each feature is built.
Being agile is about honoring the principles and values that create agility. If you stay true to those, you can’t go too far astray, regardless of what some may tell you.
4. Nothing Is Permanent So Experiment with Your Process
Part of honoring the principles of agility is to experiment with your process. Encourage the team to try new things.
Does your team love two-week sprints and think they’re working perfectly? Great. Now ask them to try a one-week or a three-week sprint and observe the results. Experiments might not always be popular, but they are the best way to ensure that you continue to uncover new, better ways of working.
5. Ensure Team Members and Stakeholders View Each Other as Peers
Team members and business-side stakeholders each bring an important perspective to a product development initiative. As such, each needs to be valued equally.
When either side views the other as something to be tolerated, the organization as a whole suffers. Development teams need to understand the unique perspective brought by stakeholders. And stakeholders need to respect the development team, including listening when developers say that a deadline is impossible.
6. Protect the Team, Including in More Ways than You May Think
Perhaps the most often given agile advice is that a Scrum Master needs to protect the team from an overly demanding product owner or stakeholders. And that’s good advice. Sometimes product owners simply ask for too much too often and too aggressively. This forces teams into cutting corners, usually quality corners, that come back to haunt the project.
And so a good Scrum Master protects the team against this.
But what you don’t hear as often is that a good Scrum Master should also protect the team against complacency. Good agile teams seek constantly to improve. Other teams settle, perhaps unconsciously, into thinking they’ve improved enough. And they likely are dramatically faster and better than before they’d heard of agile. But even great teams can often become even so much better.
Great Scrum Masters protect teams from ever feeling they’ve got nothing left to learn.
7. Banish Failure from Your Vocabulary
Every now and then I’ll visit a team that refers to a sprint as a “failed sprint.” Usually this means the team didn’t deliver everything they planned. I hardly consider that a failure, especially if the team finished most planned items or if they deftly handled an emergency.
When a basketball player shoots the ball toward the basket and scores, it’s called a field goal. When the player misses, it’s called a field goal attempt. Not a failure. An attempt.
Good Scrum Masters help teams adjust their thinking so that they recognize sprints and features that fall short of expectations as attempts rather than failures.
8. Praise Often But Always Sincerely
The other day I told my teenage daughter that I was proud of her. Her face lit up. That shouldn’t have surprised me. Who wouldn’t like to be told someone is proud of them?
But the way she reacted made me realize I must not tell her this often enough. I thought it was equivalent to me telling her something obvious, such as, “You’re tall.” But I learned it wasn’t.
Don’t ever offer false praise. No one wants to hear that. But when your team members do good work, let them know. Chances are, they aren’t hearing it often enough.
9. Encourage the Team to Take Over Your Job
A team that is new to agile will rely on their Scrum Master or coach in significant ways. The team may not know how to keep daily scrum meetings under fifteen minutes. Or they may not understand the importance of overlapping work or of being a cross-functional team.
The same is true of a an inexperienced sports team. The coach of the little kids learning to play football (soccer) needs to teach them everything. When my daughters were 6, their coach would run along the sideline the entire game yelling, “Kick and run!” If he didn’t, the young players would forget. Even with him yelling, occasionally some kid would just sit down on the grass and stare.
Contrast the coach of the young kids with the coach of a World Cup team. On a World Cup team, players have learned what to do. If the coach is late for practice, the players will know what drills or exercises to start the day with. The World Cup coach doesn’t need to remind the players to kick and run. But the World Cup team would never tell you they don’t need a coach at all.
No matter how good an agile team gets, I still think they benefit from having a Scrum Master or coach. But good agile teams take on some of the more straightforward coaching tasks themselves as part of their own journeys to mastering the skills needed in product development.
10. Shut Up and Listen
Some of the best coaching or mentoring you’ll do is to stay silent and let the team figure out the answer.
This can be hard. When you see your team struggling to figure out what to do, it’s natural to want to jump in and offer advice. But if you solve problems or even offer suggestions too readily, team members learn to just wait for you to solve every problem for them.
I don’t want to imply you can’t ever offer suggestions. You’re a smart person. If not, you wouldn’t be in the role you’re in. But part of being a great Scrum Master is helping teams learn how to solve problems on their own. If you solve every problem team members face, they don’t get a chance to learn how themselves.
The below link has blue prints for lot of the common scenarios implemented using the Azure Services. Highly recommended for anyone architecture for Azure.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/?_lrsc=1baef4b7-88ed-47bf-a7f0-371d4f1a791d
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/?_lrsc=1baef4b7-88ed-47bf-a7f0-371d4f1a791d
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/6-signs-recognize-someone-great-leader-sandeep-kashyap
We have all had them: a good leader and a bad leader. When you become a leader your skills are suddenly in the spotlight. And that defines you as “good” or “bad”.
What makes a great leader today? And what comes to your mind when you think of great leaders? Maybe something more than wearing a soft-shoulder suit or a kick-ass attitude to lead a team in your own way.
Being inspired by many great leaders, I am successfully growing at a good pace now. As so many people are relying on our(leaders) guidance and inspiration, it becomes important to look at our habits. A whopping 91% of employees feel motivated to do their best work when they have good leadership support.
Want to become a leader who gets things done? If yes, then stop using email to manage work and switch to ProofHub .
So, how do you recognize a reliable strong leader? Here are some important qualities that make a leader stand out in the crowd and you can learn many things from them:
They know their team
Outstanding results don't just happen, it involves a combined hard work from the team and the leader. And to work together, a leader needs to know its team. Effective team collaboration is in the hands of a leader. Imagine taking the wheel on a project but you have no clue about the strengths and weakness of your team.
"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is a success.'' -Henry Ford
A remarkably good leader should be knowing everything about every member of their team and look to maximize return on the capabilities of each of them.
They give credit where it's due
Trust me — there’s nothing more inspiring for a team than getting a pat on the back from their leader. As a leader, never find it hard to thank and acknowledge the efforts of your teams. Never fail to give credit where it is due. If someone even achieves a small feat, praise them with your words. It will boost the morale of the team. After all, who does not want to get a toast from their leader?
Good leaders recognize employees; great leaders appreciate them.
You will be content to show your appreciation for the hard work of others. A good leader prefers using “we” when speaking of triumphs and it goes a long way in their leadership role.
They inspire others to grow
What makes a leader inspirational? The will to inspire people to reach great heights of performance is a skill that leaders need.
Simon Sinek taught us in his TED Talk, "How Great Leaders Inspire Action," no one follows a leader for the leader, he or she follows them for inspiring themselves. As a leader, if you fail to inspire someone to grow, you will never be recognized for your leadership. Keep in mind that your key responsibility towards your team is more than just managing them.
An inspirational leader is all responsible for stirring the heart, mind, or spirit. Often, when people are void of inspiration they look for their leader to push them. We are inspired by a person to achieve things that we never thought could be possible.
They care about others
Your people must know that you genuinely care. Always keep your doors open for people to come and talk about their problems, without being hesitant. Show concern for those who are a little messed up or in stress, be concerned about their well-being and work performance. Take time out of your busy schedule to support anyone who needs you. To get the best out of the team, care for individual team members to ensure a higher productivity in return.
As a leader, it is important to understand that the people who work for you are real people who need to be satisfied and connected at work. Do your best to ensure that they are both in the right physical as well as mental state.
They are transparent in how they communicate
Transparency is a leader's best friend.
When transparency is lacking there can never be trust. Great leaders like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, have a magical aura as they follow a transparent path. But, of course, not everyone is Richard Branson. So, how transparent leadership can be your story? It all starts with reaching out your teams with a thoughtful approach to talk to them about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This can take your leadership skills too far as you and your team will get to know about each step.
You can’t be a good leader without proper communication skills. You won’t get too far without it.
They do not micromanage
Have you as a leader ever been called a "control freak"? Then you are definitely doing your leadership role wrong. This might sound like an unpleasant thing but this is a reality.
"Invariably, micromanaging results in four problems: deceit, disloyalty, conflict, and communication problems." -John Rosemond
The best leaders truly understand the art of delegation. They do not have the bad habit of interfering in the day-to-day processes of each person and overindulge with them. Give your team some space as nobody likes to be micromanaged. Stay away from their desks and manage outcomes and not how the outcome is being reached. In essence, you will see a major rise in the creative inputs of your teams as well.
To be the leader you want to be, just have confidence in your people. Have you had a great leader who has all these traits? I would love to hear about it in the comments.
We have all had them: a good leader and a bad leader. When you become a leader your skills are suddenly in the spotlight. And that defines you as “good” or “bad”.
What makes a great leader today? And what comes to your mind when you think of great leaders? Maybe something more than wearing a soft-shoulder suit or a kick-ass attitude to lead a team in your own way.
Being inspired by many great leaders, I am successfully growing at a good pace now. As so many people are relying on our(leaders) guidance and inspiration, it becomes important to look at our habits. A whopping 91% of employees feel motivated to do their best work when they have good leadership support.
Want to become a leader who gets things done? If yes, then stop using email to manage work and switch to ProofHub .
So, how do you recognize a reliable strong leader? Here are some important qualities that make a leader stand out in the crowd and you can learn many things from them:
They know their team
Outstanding results don't just happen, it involves a combined hard work from the team and the leader. And to work together, a leader needs to know its team. Effective team collaboration is in the hands of a leader. Imagine taking the wheel on a project but you have no clue about the strengths and weakness of your team.
"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is a success.'' -Henry Ford
A remarkably good leader should be knowing everything about every member of their team and look to maximize return on the capabilities of each of them.
They give credit where it's due
Trust me — there’s nothing more inspiring for a team than getting a pat on the back from their leader. As a leader, never find it hard to thank and acknowledge the efforts of your teams. Never fail to give credit where it is due. If someone even achieves a small feat, praise them with your words. It will boost the morale of the team. After all, who does not want to get a toast from their leader?
Good leaders recognize employees; great leaders appreciate them.
You will be content to show your appreciation for the hard work of others. A good leader prefers using “we” when speaking of triumphs and it goes a long way in their leadership role.
They inspire others to grow
What makes a leader inspirational? The will to inspire people to reach great heights of performance is a skill that leaders need.
Simon Sinek taught us in his TED Talk, "How Great Leaders Inspire Action," no one follows a leader for the leader, he or she follows them for inspiring themselves. As a leader, if you fail to inspire someone to grow, you will never be recognized for your leadership. Keep in mind that your key responsibility towards your team is more than just managing them.
An inspirational leader is all responsible for stirring the heart, mind, or spirit. Often, when people are void of inspiration they look for their leader to push them. We are inspired by a person to achieve things that we never thought could be possible.
They care about others
Your people must know that you genuinely care. Always keep your doors open for people to come and talk about their problems, without being hesitant. Show concern for those who are a little messed up or in stress, be concerned about their well-being and work performance. Take time out of your busy schedule to support anyone who needs you. To get the best out of the team, care for individual team members to ensure a higher productivity in return.
As a leader, it is important to understand that the people who work for you are real people who need to be satisfied and connected at work. Do your best to ensure that they are both in the right physical as well as mental state.
They are transparent in how they communicate
Transparency is a leader's best friend.
When transparency is lacking there can never be trust. Great leaders like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, have a magical aura as they follow a transparent path. But, of course, not everyone is Richard Branson. So, how transparent leadership can be your story? It all starts with reaching out your teams with a thoughtful approach to talk to them about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This can take your leadership skills too far as you and your team will get to know about each step.
You can’t be a good leader without proper communication skills. You won’t get too far without it.
They do not micromanage
Have you as a leader ever been called a "control freak"? Then you are definitely doing your leadership role wrong. This might sound like an unpleasant thing but this is a reality.
"Invariably, micromanaging results in four problems: deceit, disloyalty, conflict, and communication problems." -John Rosemond
The best leaders truly understand the art of delegation. They do not have the bad habit of interfering in the day-to-day processes of each person and overindulge with them. Give your team some space as nobody likes to be micromanaged. Stay away from their desks and manage outcomes and not how the outcome is being reached. In essence, you will see a major rise in the creative inputs of your teams as well.
To be the leader you want to be, just have confidence in your people. Have you had a great leader who has all these traits? I would love to hear about it in the comments.
Learn about Azure IoT solutions, platform services and industry-leading edge technologies.
- See how you can connect devices to create powerful IoT applications on the flexible Azure IoT platform.
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- Learn how to use Azure IoT Hub to easily create, customize, and manage all aspects of your IoT application, and IoT Edge to deploy cloud apps on the edge—creating more intelligent solutions, whether in the cloud or on-premises.
- Create visualizations of IoT time-series data and create insights from your IoT application with other Azure platform services.
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