If you have got a new website being built on a new domain name then you will need to consider what happens to all the traffic that goes to the old site once your new one has gone live. If you do not want to lose this traffic then you need to set up redirects to tell the server to take the visitors to your new site. This is usually done through a htaccess file and is fairly straight forward to do.

When you redirect the URL’s you need to decide if you are going to send them to the home page of the new site or an internal page. If the new website is going to have the same pages as the old one then it is worth spending a bit of time to redirect the old links directly to the relevant page as visitors tend to get annoyed if they click on a link in the search engines and are taken to a home page rather than the page they were expecting to see.

When moving to a new domain, don’t forget to tell Google that your site has moved using the Web master tools control panel.