Website Redesign SEO - What You Need to Know!

John Vachalek - 12.22.2009 3:00 PM

If you are considering the redesign of your Website, it is critical to consider the impacts this could have on your existing and future search engine positions.

In many cases your business will have an established Website with some decent search engine positions. In order to update your site to a new or fresher look and to include more functionality, you may be considering investing in a Website upgrade. This will usually be a more expensive Website redesign and functional upgrade which includes a CMS, maybe a blog, some sort of Social Marketing and other substantial functionality upgrades to really enhance your Online presence.

If the SEO impacts are not addressed during the planning and design of your new Website, the results could be devastating.  Some of the impacts may include:

1. A complete loss of all your current positions on the search engines
2. Penalizations by the search engines which move your results to the bottom of the listings or get you banned from showing up in the search engine results for 4 to 12 months
3. The creation of a Website which cannot ever be effectively marketed on the search engines

In over 95% of these projects, critical SEO considerations are never addressed. This happens for a number of reasons.

1. Most of the focus goes into what the new site will look like and what enhanced functions will be included
2. Businesses 100% assume that all Web development companies understand how SEO works and that this is part of any solid plan.
3. Most Web design companies DO NOT have expertise in SEO and therefore they DO NOT include this as a part of their plan. They are simply building a new Website to replace the old one.

To maximize the SEO of your Website, steps must be taken by an SEO expert during the planning phase of your new site and implemented into the content architecture and application development plans.  These critical steps include:

• Keyword research to determine the best keywords for your marketing
• Current positioning research to determine your current keyword search engine placement
• Review of your current site’s page rank
• Review of your current site’s site saturation
• Create an inventory of all relevant site pages currently indexed on Google
• If necessary, create a new site URL plan to maximize the site’s ongoing organic search results (considering all the public areas of your new site plan)
• Create a 301 redirect map for all URLs which will not be utilized in the new site
• Create an Online Marketing budget and action items list for all initial and ongoing Online Marketing activities which will be implemented at the new site
  
  • SEO
  • Content Generation
  • Local Search Marketing
  • Link Building
  • PPC Marketing
  • Social Marketing
  • Analytics and Tracking plans           
• Work closely with the site designers and application programmers to make sure all necessary functional specifications to maximize your site’s SEO activities are included in the application scope!!

How to use this information
If these steps are followed, you will not only avoid possibly devastating repercussions from your Website redesign, but you will have the opportunity to greatly improve your search engine positions.

We welcome your comments to this post if you have questions, additions or feedback. If you are planning a Website redesign and SEO is important to you, we provide a free initial project consultation.  Just call us at 1-800-657-6055.
 

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