Redesign Your Website While Preserving Search Rankings
As an Account Manager at Apogee Search, Kate van Ravenhorst has helped various clients implement website redesigns. Through her experiences Kate has discovered a few best practices for implementing a successful website redesign, and she was kind enough to share her knowledge with me.
When a company chooses to employ a website redesign there are a variety of motivating factors, but no matter why you decide to redesign your site, it is important to consider SEO throughout the process.
First, look at the organization of your website’s content. It is important that multiple pages within your site don’t compete for the same keywords. Kate suggests placing web pages that may cause an issue on different levels within the site’s hierarchy. Higher level pages are assigned higher value within search engines.
Maintaining site value is also important during a website redesign. It is helpful to preserve the existing URL structure from your original website. It is also useful to organize content in logical folder names and incorporate keywords into the URLs where appropriate. Additionally, redirects are crucial in maintaining a website’s value. A 301 redirect guides visitors to the appropriate page on your new site. 301 redirects are also the most search engine friendly web page redirection method because they allow the search engines to attribute the value of the old page to the new one. This will also help avoid having visitors encounter 404 errors for web pages that no longer exist if they arrived at your site through an old link or bookmark.
Ensure the search engines can find your new site by using HTML and XML site maps. An HTML site map lets visitors navigate your site with ease, as well as allows the search engine spiders to access the entirety of your site. XML site maps are important because they are designed specifically for search engines. They allow search engines to crawl a site more thoroughly and alert search engines of new pages. Creating a Google Webmaster Tools account is also useful, because it will provide you with general diagnostic information, notify you of indexing issues, and accelerate the indexing of your site.
Finally, you must reconfigure your tracking. If you use Google Analytics, or another analytics tool, remember to preserve historical data from your old site and create a new profile to track activity on your new site.
There is likely to be some fluctuation in rankings as you implement a redesign, but these tips will help you diminish any potential negative affects.
