Yes, sometimes it becomes important to redesign a website to earn all the advantages which are left behind. People with service and product websites are always looking for some change in website after new search engine update. Following these simple steps could help improve the immediate impact on search results for a new website, and help avoid the often significant reduction in search traffic after a website is re-launched.
If you are planning to redesign a website then it is important to create a plan from scratch and step by step execution to add every important thing. Few website owners and webmasters often wait until after their site is designed and launched before getting a SEO expert involved. Unfortunately, this can lead to expensive site design changes that could have been easily implemented during the design process. And sometimes, it’s difficult or impossible to correct issues after a website is launched without essentially rebuilding the site again.
The big disadvantage of redesigning a website is you will lose traffic from search engines for months but this impact can be minimized by taking the proper steps during the redesign process.
Here are 8 search engine optimization steps you should consider during a website redesign.
1. SEO Website Audit
Having a search engine friendly website means designing a website with no barriers to the search engines. You should follow and implement all the important points which are mentioned in the Google SEO Book to earn search engine benefits with your newly designed website. Either this is really critical for success with “organic” search engine results because the best time to ensure a search engine friendly site is during a site design.
Let’s examine it, if you have an existing website, consider performing some level of a site audit on it. In a site audit, an SEO professional or an agency examines the current website to check problems with the site design or other limitations that might hamper organic search engine ranking and results, so that concerns can be addressed during the design of the new site.
See How to Improve Organic Search Results with a Simple Site Audit for some steps you can take to flush out most issues with a small to midsize website.
2. Design Reviews To Develop A Search Engine Friendly Website
During the website redesign, an SEO professional should first examine it from scratch which includes different waterfall models and site prototypes, development test sites at different stages in the design, development and deployment process to ensure search engine friendliness.
3. Determining Important Keyword Phrases
This is really important point in design process because you have to add new keyword phrases (search terms) for your website which are new and can help you to get good traffic.
- Keyword Research
Create a List of keyword phrases people are searching on to find your products and services as well as related topics in the major search engines.
- Search Engine Advertising
If you have run a search engine advertising campaign on your existing site for eg. a PPC campaign such as Google AdWords so please hand over its details to SEO professional to examine the campaign results to check for keyword phrases which brought significant targeted traffic to the site and more importantly, which phrases resulted in engaged visitors (as measured by metrics such as Time on Site, Page Views, Bounce Rate, Views of key pages, etc) and conversions (signups, leads, sales etc). The key point is the keyword phrases that pay off in a search engine advertising campaign are ideal candidates for improvement in organic search results.
- Web Site Analytics/Reports
The website analysis tools like Google Analytics plays an important role in determining which keyword phrases brought significant targeted traffic to the website by keyword and again, more importantly, which phrases resulted in “engaged” visitors and conversions. If advanced analytics are not available, you may have site reports that will at least show you what keyword phrases are bringing significant traffic to the site.
- Google’s Webmaster Tools
It is really good to have a Google webmaster tool account because you can get a fair amount of information about the keyword phrases for which your site is being found such as impressions (how many times a page on your site appear in a search result for a keyword phrase) and click-throughs (Webmaster Tools / Your Site on the web / Search queries).
A cautionary note regarding relying on analytics/webmaster tools and site reports only:
If you only use analytics/webmaster tools or site reports to conclude what keyword phrase reached the site in the past, you may be missing many important keyword opportunities to increase your changes to get targeted traffic. So if you don’t have data it may be advisable to consider delaying a site redesign if possible, in order to perform keyword research and possibly run a search engine advertising campaign for a number of months to determine which keywords bring engaged visitors to the site that convert because it’s the time of redesign and you can make any necessary changes you want…
4. Use Important Keyword Phrases In website Design
The above step is important because now you’ve the important keywords for your site and the approximate numbers of people searching on them in the major search engines from within the territory you cover, here’s how to use the data:
- Are enough people searching on your target keyword phrases?
It is really important to determine which keywords really works for you and if this hasn’t already been determined in the past, then use the keyword data (defined in step 3) to help you estimate if there are sufficient targeted people searching within your anticipated territory to indicate whether search marketing might become an important marketing channel for you. This will help you make a decision how much effort to put into search engine marketing during and after a site design.
- Do you need to add content to the site?
Content is such an important factor and content written in manner to help visitors on the page can be really effective. You should consider adding content to the website to better focus on important keyword phrases if needed. In addition, do you see people searching for related topics? It may make sense to include that content on the web site to make the website more useful and to help get those web pages found by people searching for that information. During the site design process and after the site is launched, work on ways to get theses visitors interested in your products and services.
- Optimize pages for target keywords.
Onsite Optimization is the most important thing during the site development process, for the best chance at appearing in search results for your important keywords when the site is launch. Title, Meta description and schema tags are important factors which needs to be in your onsite updates. In many cases, optimization of specific pages can be enhanced after the site is launched, and often has to be because of time constraints or in the case of bringing in an SEO after the fact.
- Develop relevant tags.
Create a short list of keywords to focus on. Use them in important tags, H1 tags, ALT attribute of Image tag, Title tags and Meta Description tags for most (if not all) the web pages of your site, ideally before the site is launched. Again, as long as you have developed a search engine friendly site, you can do more specific optimization after the site is launched.
5. Develop Easy Navigation and Site Linking Structure
Once you’ve determined the content for the site, now you have to create navigation to connect product and services pages of your site which can helps visitors to go through every listed page in navigation. You can develop a navigation structure with some advanced CSS rules that allows site visitors to easily navigate through the site. Give some thought to organizing your site around important keyword themes which can help improve search engine rankings. (Internal site linking also affects search rankings.)
However, remember that your visitors come first. Try to keep bounce rate in your mind and make necessary steps to reduce it. Your site must be designed in such a way that visitors can find what they are looking for and be designed so that the site effectively engages these visitors and persuades them to move along to a conversion. Thinking about keyword themes can help you accomplish this and improve search engine rankings at the same time.
For example, I was the SEO consultant on a large travel site design. They sold cruiser packages worldwide and they weren’t sure how to organize the site, perhaps by type of packages. The keyword research clearly showed that people almost always searched for 2 or 3 days tour not 1 day. Therefore, we designed the site with the days you want holiday in the main categories leading to an internal linking structure based on how people typically search.
6. Determine Which Pages Bring Traffic To The Live Site For Important Keyword Phrases
The Landing pages are determined by using a combination of website analytics (Top Landing pages: keyword in Google Analytics), Google’s Webmaster Tools (Your Site on the web / Search queries /Pages), or manual searches, determine which pages on your current website are appearing near the top of search engine results. By optimizing landing pages you can earn really good chances to increase sale for your product and services. Determine whether those are bringing significant traffic for the keywords that are important to your website, and whether it is traffic that is engaged and converts.
For these pages you’ll want to consider the following:
- Reuse important content by rewriting and adding important product and service pages link. If possible, reuse much of the content on pages of the new site, ideally using the same URL structure if possible.
- Minimize the impact of URL changes. If the URL structure must change, it could impact your search results for months after the site is relaunched as the search engines need to recrawl the site to find the new pages. You can use Fetch-> Crawl setting in Google webmaster tools to fetch your redesigned site. You can minimize the impact of changes to URL’s for important pages by applying 301 redirects to as many of these pages as possible.
7. Review Incoming Links To The Site From Other Websites
Now it’s time to calculate which website links to your site from other web pages on the Internet are bringing targeted traffic to the site, and which links in particular may be helping the pages of your website reach higher positions in search engine results. If any of these incoming links point to inner pages of your current website and the URLs to those pages will be changed, then you need to apply 301 redirects to these pages so that they redirect to the most appropriate page on the new site.
8. Ensure That An Effective 404 Error Page Is Setup Before Launch
404 pages are really helpful and can help you to get traffic as well. Please don’t forget to set up an effective custom page not found error page (404 error page) before launching the redesigned site with few links to your product or services pages to redirect 404 page visitors.
This is very important to have in place as the site is relaunched because many people may be clicking on search results that link to pages on the site that have just been moved or deleted. Add any new tactics to understand while redesigning a website in comment and keep sharing…..
via:http://www.webbloggers.net/8-important-seo-steps-during-a-website-redesign/
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