Ten Things To Consider When Going Through a Site Redesign
I have seen it happen time and time again. The decision is made to redesign the company web site. There could be a variety of reasons for this – the site needs a fresh design to bring it up to date, the company is looking to create a more user friendly experience, a new content management system (CMS) is being added or some other reason. However, in he process regard for search engine visibility is not included in the overall plan. The new site is launched and everyone waits for the traffic to pour in but for some reason it doesn’t. In fact, traffic declines. Sales drop. The CEO is demanding answers. What happened and who’s fault is it?
What happened is that no steps were taken to retain traffic from the search engines during the site redesign process. Plenty of effort was put into aesthetics, functionality, the CMS, etc., but somehow, some way, search engine traffic was forgotten. Visibility has all but disappeared and you are perplexed as to what your next move should be. Do quality search referrals have to be sacrificed just because you want to make your web site better? Certainly not! All it takes is a little planning, a little accommodating, a little strategy and a lot of teamwork.
While each web property is unique and will present its own challenges, here is a top ten list I have compiled of things to consider and plan for when redesigning your web site. For each item, I will present a scenario, the problems that the scenario may present and finally some solutions to overcome the problems.
1. File Extension Changes / Replacement of Pages
Scenario – You are moving from a static web site to a content management system so you can manage your web site with more ease. However this will change the file extensions on your current web pages. Formerly your pages used the .html extension but now they will use the .php extension. While you may have the same content, you now have a whole new set of web pages.
Problems – The main problem with changing file name extensions is that many of your old pages may have been ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Now they will be replaced with a new set of pages. This will cause the old pages to disappear from the search indices which in turn may cause you to miss out on a lot of valuable traffic.
In another scenario, should you decide to leave the old pages up along with the new ones, you now have a situation where duplicate content exists on your site. This puts you in a position where you are vulnerable to a duplicate content penalty.
Solutions – Should you just abandon the idea of incorporating a CMS because your file names will change? Certainly not. If the CMS will help you manage your web site with more ease as well as create a better user experience for your visitors, by all means employ it. There is a way to let the search engines know that your old pages have now been changed into new pages. It is called a 301 permanent redirect. A 301 redirect tells a search engine that a certain page no longer exists and points them to the page that is to replace it. They interpret this information, discarding the old pages while indexing the new pages in
their place. Even the link popularity or PageRank that the old pages have earned will be passed on to the new pages.
How do you set up 301 redirects? In a Unix/Linux environment, you would add the redirect code to your .htaccess file. For example, let’s say you are renaming a index.html file into a index.php file. The code would look something like this:
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David Wallace is CEO and founder of SearchRank, an original search engine optimization and marketing firm based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is experienced in search engine optimization and marketing, pay per click and pay for inclusion management, directory submissions and web site design usability. David is a frequent contributor to various search engine related forums, an active editor of popular directories such as GoGuides.org, Joe Ant and Zeal and has had several articles published on industry related sites. Since 1997, David along with his company have helped hundreds of businesses both large and small increase their search engine visibility and customer acquisitions.
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