SEO and Website Redesign
Thinking about redesigning your out-of-date website? While you may be focusing on aesthetics and content, you don’t want to make the mistake of overlooking the importance of SEO, and possibly loosing the existing search traffic of your old site. When lodestar helps to redesign a website, we place SEO as a top priority. We make sure every aspect of the new website has SEO best practices in place, to ensure your efforts of website redesign pay off with an increase in search traffic. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when redesigning your website:
1. Try to avoid changing URLs. If you must, such as if you are switching to a different content management system, then try to redirect the old URLs to the matching ones on the new site. If this seems like too big of a task, then you should at least focus on the top pages, such as the homepage, top entry pages, and most popular pages. Make this a priority. You want to make sure the redirects are in place before the search engine spiders revisit your site.
2. Be careful with content changes. If your old website was already optimized for SEO, changing the content drastically may decrease rankings on your important keywords. However, if you did not have SEO in place in your old website, now is the perfect time to get SEO best practices into place and ensure your website will draw in more targeted traffic.
3. Create and submit an XML sitemap. It can take a few months for search engines to follow a redirect to a new webpage and rank it. To speed up this process, you should create an XML sitemap and then submit it to search engines to be indexed. You want to make sure your new site is indexed as quickly as possible so that visitors will be able to find it.
These are just a few tips to keep in mind when undergoing a website design. It may seem overwhelming to get all the important SEO best practices in place, but the effort will be worth it. Let lodestar help you with your website redesign and guarantee that every aspect of your new site has SEO in place.
This article was posted by Carolyn Berger, Director of Marketing and Operations at lodestar marketing group. If you need help with your search engine marketing, please contact lodestar at sarah@lodestarmg.com.