Website redesign: Don't forget about search engines
“Right, we’ve finished our web re-design, now we need one of those search engine people”
Cue disappointed look from ’search engine types’.
Getting Search Engine attention is at least as much about what is done on the website as it is about external factors. These are far better thought about during the re-building of a website rather than afterwards. Not only that, it’s always difficult to propose changes to people who have waited a long time for their new site, hence the downcast feeling.
What to think about when re-designing a website
First things first: get some analytic software running on the site, so that you know which pages are getting traffic. This will help planning.
Do think about the existing ‘URL’s – the page addresses.
These are often changed, without a thought, to match the new schema. Of course, by ‘changed’ what we really mean is deleted and completely new pages put in their stead. They didn’t move them, they knocked the house down and built it elsewhere.
Redirects are important. Whenever you change an address, tell the people who send you things because if not, it will be ‘return to sender’.
How much that matters – probably depends on the page, but if visitors matter, then lets send them to a page that looks like something they were expecting, instead of a home page, or black holes.
The next thing is to check for Page Titles and Descriptions. Relevance is important, and if you were receiving visitors it was because Search Engines thought your page was relevant for ’something in particular’. The ‘in particular’ is usually from the page title, content, and incoming links, but descriptions can help improve the number of visitors.
For the avoidance of doubt, here’s how Google uses page Titles, Descriptions and URL’s
All these things are inserted during the page construction, during the (re) building phase.
Yes, the external factors are important for SEO, but if the website isn’t properly organised, then it will never work as well as it could.
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Thanks Matt . Your URL point is very important and something that is often not thought through at the start of a redesign. Will pass this article on to my clients. Sonja