Module 5 – Redirecting your Old Site URL to your New Site URL

Who is this for?

Any club or district that has an existing website in which:

• The domain name is under the control of the club or district
• Club/district has control over the DNS of the old domain
• Club/district wishes to point all users to the new club site URL

How Domain Forwarding Works

This is typically done from inside your domain provider website, for example GoDaddy.com. You simply create a permanent domain forwarding rule and then all traffic will be redirected from the old domain to the new domain.

Why Permanent?

• Permanent (301) is the best solution when moving from an existing domain to a new domain. Search engines will not negatively affect your organic search rankings when using this approach
• Temporary (302) is only used for extreme cases and can negatively affect your organic search rankings
• Forward with Masking will absolutely negatively affect your organic search rankings by creating duplicate content due to the way it works behind the scenes.

What are Organic Search Results?

Organic search results are the ones we want! They are earned solely through effective SEO practices, not paid for (i.e. not advertising). These used to be easy to spot – the ads were clearly labeled as such and the remaining results typically took the form of “10 blue links” listed below them. Generally people will avoid paid search results because the quality cannot be guaranteed.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Where do I start?

Here is a PDF of the Kiwanis SEO Bootcamp presentation. This has plenty of tips to get you started.

Here is a link to Google’s SEO Starter Guide