Redesigning Your Site? What You Need to Know for SEO
It is recommended, with the changing state of the Internet and its users that websites need to be redesigned from time to time. A well designed site will look old and stale after some time if nothing is done to refresh it. Visitors expect to see something new and if a site looks the same for a long period of time, the business might lose clients to modern and better looking rivals.
Although a redesign can be a boon to many sites, it is important to bear in mind proper SEO while doing so. There are some aspects of ecommerce SEO as well as informational SEO that should be considered when redesigning a site to ensure that your site does well after the transformation. Here are some important pointers to look at:
Maintain important keywords
Before you go about designing and launching your new site, look at the important keywords you sued in your old site. Look at the keywords that brought most of the traffic in, the keywords that lead to the highest number of conversations and keywords that ranked well. Be sure to include these keywords in the new site. Ensure that they are included in both the on-page content and the html tags that are important to SEO. These include meta descriptions and title tags.
Maintain important pages
Important pages are just as important to a website, new or old, as important words are. Look out for the pages that ranked well on Google, the pages that brought in the most traffic into the site and the pages that lead to the most conversations. These pages should be kept in your new redesigned site.
Keep the same URL
If your site has been around for some time and you have done good SEO work on it, it must have caught the eye of Google at some point including the links from external sites, visitors who visit the site and are familiar with the URL and the brand associated with it. Changing your URL at this point may not be a very good idea, you will just end up working all over again to get the hard-earned benefits. The only reason you would want a new URL is if you think you will get a higher organic traffic. But move wisely here, URLs can deceive. Some keywords that you think will get you a high number of searches can be too broad to create an impact. Add to that the changes Google constantly makes to its algorithms, it’s not as easy to game a system with a good URL now.
Improve the user experience
Bear in mind that a big part of SEO is usability of the site. If your main SEO is good already, focus on the user experience when you redesign your site. If your site is not user friendly, chances are visitors will go back to the search engine results page (SERP) and Google might just downgrade your site in the rankings because searchers aren’t so happy with their experience on your site. See that each page has a purpose for the visitor. If your pages don’t fulfill this, you will have a tough time with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.
With all these steps, you can focus on redesigning your website for a better user experience, without affecting the SEO work that you have done. This will only help improve your SEO, traffic and in turn, your income.
