Website Redesign and SEO Tips

Darren Franks - November 7, 2011

SEO implementation has many facets. From optimizing some pages on your current website to building a brand new website from the ground up with SEO in mind; but what about a complete overhaul of your current site? Would it even be possible because of the constraints of the old CMS or platform your website is built on?

Once you’ve made the decision to get that new version of the site up and running, here are a few SEO implementation strategies to contemplate:

Plan the structure of the new site; Is it logically organized so search engines and site visitors can get to all of the important pages in a couple of clicks?

1. Decide on a “theme” and a well researched keyword for each of the new and old pages you would like to position as a target for search.
2. Re-write and optimize your metadata and content for the new keyphrases.
3. Be very certain that the new site’s design is SEO friendly; is all navigation crawlable?
4. Regenerate a new XML Sitemap to augment crawling and indexing of the site’s new and old pages.
5. Update external link references if any of the page names are changed.

The above considerations are extremely important for your optimized website redesign, but I think there are 3 other considerations that, above all, have the most impact; keeping the domain name the same (to preserve trust rankings with the search engines and to mitigate the need for redirects), ensuring the new site design is friendly for both the users and the search engines (is the site’s new interface something you and your users like; maybe utilize a third party usability study?) and properly redirecting the search engines and users to any new page names. All of this will ensure a smooth changeover from the older version of the site to the new one.