Re-designed that “old” site?
New site’s looking good. Navigates better, more user centric, reads well… yep this new design rocks! Approved! Make it live!
Hey, what the heck? What happened to our “old” ranking in the Search Engines???
It’s important to keep your website fresh and your content both rich and relevant to meet the demands of buyers as well as the ever maturing search engines that index your site. Often, while websites are being re-developed, all the thought goes to the design, navigation and optimization of the new, while forgetting that the original site may have some good stuff to offer in existing Search Engine placement.
If not done properly, here’s what happens:
- You could lose your rank for keywords and keyword phrases you are already ranking for.
- You could be re-writing content for no strategic reason.
- You could lose the value of your existing inbound links.
Proper Search Engine Optimization affects how you organize the pages on your site, your navigation, the words you use to name your pages and many more things that are more expensive and time consuming to change after you rebuild your site.
Some points to consider when doing a site redevelopment project:
- Generate a list of the existing sites URLs
- If you are changing URLs in any way, (and you most likely are) ALWAYS 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL where content most closely matches the content of the old URL. Though you can do this at a site level, it is best to do it at a page specific level for well ranking pages.
- Review your web analytics and analyze the traffic you are getting from search engines. Note which pages are getting organic traffic and what search phrases people are using to find those pages. This will give you great insight into which phrases your pages are already ranking for so you can be sure that the <title>, <h1>, <meta> etc. on the new page includes those phrases.
- Put a lot of time and thought into selecting title tags. Use the data from your web analytics to determine which keywords you should target for each URL.
- Make sure EVERY page uses <h1> tags that target one or more of the most important keyword phrases used in your title tag.
- Where possible use <h2> tags to reference the lesser important keyword phrases you are targeting.
- Create <meta> descriptions for every page. Limit them to 150 characters and try to include every keyword you deemed important enough to be in the <title> and <h1> tags.
- Use breadcrumbs on your pages. They help to enforce the navigation path of the site and give you one more place where you get to use relevant link text.
- Stay away from using terms like “Click here” as link text. Be clear on describing what the internal link relates to.
- Update your XML site map with the new URLs and properly re-submit your new site map to Google.
- Keep tabs on where you were and where you are going in the Search Engines.
Bear in mind that you may see some “scary” movement in your ranking for some time immediately after the launch of the new site, but if it was done correctly you should soon see a positive gain in the areas that mean the most to your business.
It’s well worth the investment in the long run.
