By the end of the year, many businesses start thinking about redesigning their tired old website to give it new life. You may also be in the middle of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the website infrastructure to be compatible with search engine crawlers.
Beyond that, you need to go through a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO on top during this period is twofold: so you don't lose old traffic, but also so you can get more targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.
Here are 6 SEO Redesign Secrets Your Developer May Not Know, Ignore Them at Your Own Peril!
1. Creating The Architecture Of Your SEO Site
Search engines explicitly look at how all of your pages link to determine your position within the site. Pages that are linked from all other pages will carry more weight than those that are linked from only a few others. All of this is considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google parlance, internal PageRank.
Recommendation: When redesigning, don't hide any content on your site that previously generated targeted search engine traffic. Make sure that any informative content that focuses on the most competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is at the top of your site's hierarchy.
Also, all content included in a specific category should be linked through some sort of sub-navigation within that section.
2. Categorization and Avoid Duplicate Content
When people search for information on a search engine, they usually have a specific question, problem, or need for information. The search queries they use on Google and other engines reflect this. The more ways you can classify your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.
Tip: Make sure all top-level pages answer the potential researcher's (your prospects') questions and make it clear that your products and services can solve their problem. Additionally, you should also make sure that no matter how someone finds content on your site, it always ends up on the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.
For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it can be included in both categories. However, the page (URL) the prospect lands on, regardless of the category they started in, should always be the same.
3. New Content Management System and URL Modification
If URLs must change during redesign due to a new back-end tagging or content management system, it may take a while for search engines to index the new URLs and assign them the same weight they gave the old URLs due to to URL age factors.
Recommendation: It is crucial to 301 redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will quickly switch link popularity from the old URLs to the new ones, as well as ensuring that site visitors don't get 404 not found errors.
This will be easier if the name of the new URL is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If your URLs need to change completely without any correlation to previous URL names and manual redirects are required, we recommend that you redirect at least all top-level pages, plus those that are likely to receive keyword traffic from search engines. But ideally every URL should be redirected if possible.
4. Coding of Navigation Menus
The links contained in the navigation of your website must be coded in a way that is understandable for search engines so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, meaning pages linked within them don't receive the internal link popularity they should.
Recommendation: Make sure all navigation menus are coded with search engine friendly CSS. Also, avoid links to dropdown boxes as the main form of navigation (CSS scrolling is fine). You'll also want to make sure all content is accessible via tagged links; don't force the user to go through any kind of search box menus because they are traditionally hostile to search engines.
5. Custom HTML Elements
While some level of automation for titles, meta, headers, URLs, and alternate attributes for images can be helpful, it's imperative that your new website's content management system allows you to create custom descriptions for these as well.
Tip: Make sure your content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields, as each page may require a different number of words and characters.
6. Session ID and Other Tracking Links
It's best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system has to use them, you'll just need to provide "clean" URLs to search engine spiders, otherwise they might get stuck in an endless loop , indexing the same content. under various URLs.
We also recommend that you avoid any type of campaign tracking link added to URLs, as it can split your link popularity and cause your content to be indexed across multiple URLs.
Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for each page of content.
Don't be surprised if your developer isn't happy with some of these "secrets". He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or that their creativity is being hampered. Just remember that it is your website that you are paying them to create it in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know beforehand that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you they can't do any of the above, start looking for a new developer, ASAP!
While there will always be some unexpected mistakes to fix when your site goes live, you shouldn't be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you're doing. We have successfully helped many companies through this smooth transition. At the end of the process, there's nothing like the feeling of having launched your beautiful new website. But more than that, it's a great comfort to know that people looking for what you offer will continue to find you easily in search engines.
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