A complete website redesign might be just what your business needs - to improve usability, update content, try out new functionality, or move to a new platform.
However redesigning your website can have a big effect on your SEO - as by changing or deleting old content or pages, you run the risk of losing the SEO value they contained. SEO success takes a long time to achieve - so make sure you don’t ever throw it away!
Here’s are our top 3 problems to look out for - and how to manage them appropriately, so your SEO suffers as little as possible in the upheaval.
1. Watch out for changing URLs
If you redesign a site, you often change to a new CMS, or to a new platform - for example from .html to a .php platform.
Both of these scenarios will mean all your URLs will change - leaving your entire old site invalid, and a whole new website for the search engines to index. Inbound links to your old site will now result in an error page for Users - meaning you may experience a significant decrease in traffic.
Solution:
- If your platform is just changing - then place a permanent 301 redirect on your server, redirecting traffic to any old pages to the equivalent new ones
- If your new URLs will be significantly different, then you can place individual 301 redirects on old pages, to the most relevant new ones - try to ensure this is done for at least all your top level pages
- If you can’t manually redirect all of your old URLs, then ensure you tailor your 404-not-found page to assist Users landing there - for example with a sitemap of your new site.
2. Adding Flash
In a redesign Flash is often added to improve the look of a website. Whilst Flash isn’t as inpenetrable to search engines as many SEOs would have you believe, you do need to be careful if you’re serious about your SEO strategy.
Solution:
- Don’t encase your entire website in Flash - an entire website can be contained in one flash file, making it difficult for search engines to differentiate between different pages, and therefore index all of your pages
- If you are going to need alot of Flash, then make sure you provide alternate content for those who don’t have Flash installed (eg. iPhone users), and content for the search engines to index
- Avoid using Flash to build your navigation - it still hasn’t been proven that search engines can follow Flash links, and this may mean your content won’t get spidered
3. Retaining the SEO power of your pages
Just because you have a new site shouldn’t mean you should discard all the SEO lessons you learn’t from the last one! Doing so will put you back to SEO Square 1.
Solution:
- If copy or metadata was working for your old site - then make sure you migrate it! It’s often tempting in a redesign to ’start from scratch’ and do away with old copy - but if that copy was bringing in significant amounts of traffic, then why lose it? Instead try testing different versions of it (using a tool like Google’s Website Optimiser) - to make the copy even more SEO friendly
- If you already did a significant amount of work to tailor your meta tags - then make sure you transfer these correctly. Similarly if you haven’t done much work on them, then use this opporunity to do so
Conclusion:
A website redesign is a fantastic time to really undertake a SEO assault, or to overhaul your existing SEO strategy. It means that you can build best practice SEO into the very fabric of your site, rather than as an afterthought later on.
So if you’re planning a website redesign, we recommend getting in touch with us or other experienced SEO consultants at this stage - it will save you alot of money in the long run, and will your give your new revamped site the real chance it deserves in the search engine rankings!
