Maximize SEO During Website Redesign

Search-savvy marketers will often approach search engine marketing firms when they are planning a website re-design. They want to determine how the re-design may impact their search engine marketing (SEM) campaign and they want to know how they can minimize negative repercussions.

At HiveMind, we don’t think you should ever look at a re-design of your website as an inevitable SEM disaster. Instead your focus should be on the long-term improvements that can be attained if the re-design is done correctly. There are four key areas on which you should focus attention during a redesign:

• Setting expectations
• Improving the new site
• Transferring from old to new
• Timing of each step

Setting Expectations

Expectation setting begins with an honest assessment of your website’s current situation, as this will determine what is at stake. Where is your website currently found within the major search engines? The best way to determine this is to check your site’s visibility within some of the top search properties — such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL — by performing queries on your most important keywords within these engines, or by relying on a search engine marketing firm to provide you with a visibility report. It is also helpful to examine log file data to identify the amount of traffic that is getting to your site via search engines. If you track revenue and conversions, utilize that data as well.

It is often true that a significant re-design (one that encompasses more than look-and-feel changes) will result in a short-term blip in website visibility. It usually takes 1-2 months (sometimes longer with a very competitive keyword set) to earn back that lost visibility and surpass it. During this time, you should increase your investment in keyword buys like Overture and Google AdWords, as well as paid inclusion programs like the Overture SiteMatch Xchange. This will minimize drops in traffic and website conversions.

Building a Better Site

A re-design is the perfect opportunity to build a more crawler-friendly website. Typical areas of improvement include: more compact site code, increased internal linking within the site, intuitive directory and file naming, and, of course, improvements to site content to more closely appeal to search engines’ algorithms. We recommend examining existing content carefully for keyword density and rewriting copy as necessary.

Timing

Start thinking about all these factors as early as possible. Make sure that individuals in your organization understand both the short and long term implications of a site re-design. It is usually much easier to make significant website changes if they are considered from day one. Above all, remember that this re-design is an opportunity to rid yourself of problematic items and increase your long-term potential for driving natural or (“organic”) search engine traffic.

Development

Make sure your web developer uses title and meta tags for each of the site’s pages using relevant content from the page and identified high value keywords. Other development mandates include:

1. The majority of the site should display short/search engine friendly static URLs that contain high value keywords.
2. Critical content should be positioned at the top of the page to give the search spiders more immediate access to it.
3. All page headers should use (H1) tags.
4. Robot.txt files should be included that instruct the search spiders to index all public pages.

Link Structure

The new site should include a dynamically generated site map that can act as a link hub allowing search spiders to crawl and access each page on the site. It should also include text-based navigation links at the bottom of each page to allow the search spiders to access all of the pages on the site.

Content Mapping

Existing pages that rank well under high value keywords should be moved to the new site without changing content. Make sure that your web development team implements permanent 301 redirects. This can be accomplished in two ways:

1. Alternative 1: Install and program ISAPI Rewrite to redirect old pages to new pages
2. Alternative 2: Write 301 code in asp and manually insert in each page.

All other applicable pages should use 301 redirects to cover any unidentified search listings. As a safety measure, a custom 404 map should be created to redirect visitors to appropriate pages. 

Transitioning the Old Site

It is important to make use of the successful elements of your old site. Determine your best performing pages (those that are ranking well within the major search engines) and try to move them without making major changes to your new site. If there are filename changes, make sure that any old pages that have been indexed with search engines are re-directed to relevant new pages on the updated version of the website.

Make sure to lobby the editors at directories like Yahoo! and The Open Directory to update your listings. Finally, ask anyone who links to an outdated page on site to update the link to a new page. This will go a long way towards helping to keep up the credibility of your new website.