Website redesigns carry a significant level of risk to existing organic rankings and revenue. If the website redesign is not built in an SEO friendly manner, the new website can experience a dramatic drop in rankings and site traffic. You can reduce the risk associated with a website redesign by taking these key factors into consideration:
1. Preserve Your Link Inventory – understand where your important/relevant links are coming from. Have these sites update their links to point to your new site pages and reclaim your inbound links.
2. Page Size is Important – too little text or too much text can negatively affect how the search engine perceives the page’s relevance. Consider your customer first, and make sure you provide them with the content they need. Ask yourself ‘what is the purpose of this web page, why would people come to it, what do they want to do when they get here, what to do we want them to do, and how do we make it easy for them to do it?’
3. Content is King –when it comes to search engines and their ability to crawl, index and rank websites, content is what they are looking for. Optimize your content for your key phrases.
4. Update Your Sitemaps – this includes your standard HTML sitemap to help customers navigate a large website, as well as an XML sitemap to help the search engine spiders crawl your site.
5. Make Effective use of Text Navigation and Keyword-Rich Text Links – interlinking of your site pages can ensure that both search engines and human visitors are able to access all of your important site content.
6. Optimize for Blended Search – optimize your images, video, press releases and blog(s) for blended search. This is something that should be ongoing but can be easily accomplished when completing a website redesign.
7. Map Out Your Site Hierarchy / URL Structure – how you serve up your site’s content can have a dramatic effect on your search engine rankings. Determine if you should use a sub-domain vs. sub-folder strategy as you redesign your website.
8. Test Design Changes – set up a test environment to test everything from home page mockups to site navigation, and other on-page optimization factors.
9. Make Use of 301 Redirects – if you need to redirect any of your old content to the new site be sure to use 301 (permanent) redirection.
10. Dynamic vs. Static URLs – HTML was once considered the most acceptable language to search engine spiders for being straightforward and the easiest coding language to read and index. Search engines tended to give preference in rankings to static-appearing sites, which, for dynamic sites, was accomplished by rewriting URLs to change dynamic pages to appear as static, or actually coding an entire site in HTML. But search engines have made progress! While it is still advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible as they can have a slight advantage in terms of click through rates, the decision to use dynamic URLs does not necessarily mean a disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking.
TIP: Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to allow Google to find, index, and rank your site and mitigate the risk of losing rankings in Google:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
For these and more tips on SEO for Website Redesign, download our FREE eBook SEO for Website Redesigns now. Included in the eBook:
• 4 Stages of Website Redesign
• 8 Mistakes to Avoid when Redesigning your Website
• Website Redesign Cheat Sheet
• Website Redesign Checklist
Shortlink:
(click to copy)
[...] SEO for website redesign Tom Says This is not going to make web design any easier. In fact, it will probably make it harder, but that's because you'll be a lot smarter. [...]
[...] doing your rework with eMagine, you won’t have to worry about any of this. But if not, we found a nifty guide posted by Karl Hourigan on Mediative’s “The Results People” blog that your Webmaster, IT [...]
Thanks for your time and consideration of other folks by making this blog available.
Great List. As said content is the king. It should be on the top. Properly created quality content gives more seo results in our experience. Thanks
That is really attention-grabbing, You are an excessively skilled blogger. I have joined your rss feed and sit up for in quest of more of your fantastic post. Additionally, I’ve shared your web site in my social networks
You realize therefore considerably relating to this subject, produced me individually consider it from a lot of various angles. Its like women and men are not interested unless it’s one thing to accomplish with Girl gaga! Your own stuffs nice. At all times take care of it up!
I am now not certain where you are getting your information, but great topic. I needs to spend a while studying much more or working out more. Thanks for fantastic information I used to be in search of this info for my mission.
I do trust all of the ideas you’ve introduced on your post. They are really convincing and will certainly work. Still, the posts are very brief for newbies. May you please prolong them a bit from subsequent time? Thanks for the post.
Google is serious with its paid links policy. If you don’t have any idea with regards to this policy, you can review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The policy states a site can be penalized once it sells or buys links that pass PageRank—which is the common thing happening today. Quality and quantity of links are the most significant factors that affect the result of a particular search engine query. Authority and reputation of a site are governed by these two factors also. In short, if you have tons of links from high ranking sites, you can totally dominate your niche. But wait. That holds true a few months ago before the latest Google Panda updates.
Marah
internet marketing Long Beach