Six Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

January 8, 2010 by FTS
Filed under Internet Marketing SEO

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At the tip of the year, many businesses begin to think about redesigning their tired recent web site to breathe some new life into it. You’ll even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first issue is to form positive you rent a design and development company that knows how to create the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler-friendly manner.

Beyond that, you would like to handle a variety of additional SEO techniques before you get too deep into your redesign. The rationale you would like to keep SEO front and center throughout this point is twofold: therefore that you are doing not lose your previous traffic, however also thus that you’ll gain additional targeted search engine guests when the new site goes live.

Here are half-dozen SEO redesign secrets your developer could not know…ignore them at your own peril!

1. Making Your SEO’d Web site Design

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together so as to see their place at intervals the site. Pages that are linked from each alternative page will be given more weight than those that are solely linked from some others. This is often all considered a kind of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, do not bury too deeply inside the location any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Guarantee that any informational content that can be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (as an example, product and repair pages) is high up in your web site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a very specific class ought to be cross-linked via some kind of sub-navigation inside that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When folks are seeking information from an exploration engine, they sometimes have a query, a downside, or a want for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the opposite engines replicate this. The more ways that you’ll categorize your content for the numerous target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be positive that all high-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) queries, which it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how somebody found any piece of content on your web site, they always finish up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

As an example, if a particular product can be classified as both a product and a service, it is sensible that it might be listed underneath both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, irrespective of which class they started in, should forever be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must modification within the redesign thanks to a replacement content management system or back-end coding, search engines might take it slow to index the new URLs along with provide them the identical weighting they gave the previous URLs thanks to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It is vital to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart at intervals the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the previous URLs to the new ones quickly, and guarantee that site visitors do not receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is kind of like the previous one, as a result of you’ll use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you will wish to at least redirect all the prime-level pages, and people who you are certain receive keyword traffic from search engines. However, ideally, every URL should be redirected if in the least possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained among the navigation of your web site ought to be coded during a search engine-friendly manner thus that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to go looking engines, that causes the pages linked at intervals them to not receive the internal link popularity they must receive.

Recommendation: Create sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that’s visible to search engines. Additionally, avoid drop-down box links as the most kind of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You will additionally need to make sure that all content will be reached by arduous-coded links – don’t force the user to travel through any reasonably search box menu as a result of those are historically search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images will be useful, it is important that your new web site’s content management system enable you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Build positive the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There ought to be no limit to the amount of characters allowed in these fields either, because each page may would like a totally different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It is best not to use session IDs to track guests, but if your system must use them, you may solely want to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the identical content under multiple URLs.

You’ll additionally need to avoid any type of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed below multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to take care of one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive a number of these “secrets.” She might feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Simply keep in mind that it is your website that you’re paying them to form during a way that can create you the foremost cash possible. Let your developer recognize up-front that this stuff are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the on top of, begin trying around for a replacement developer – ASAP!

While there will forever be some unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine guests so long as you know what you’re doing. We tend to’ve successfully helped several corporations through this transition without any glitches. At the top of the process, there is nothing like the sensation of getting your lovely new website launched. But a lot of than that, there’s nice comfort in knowing that the people wanting for what you supply will still be ready to simply realize you within the search engines.

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