SEO For Website Redesign
A website redesign can have a great impact on SEO. Redesigning a website is like walking into a minefield it can be said that in search engine optimisation in bad cases you can lose all your search engine ranking and will have to start from scratch. If you do that transitions in the right way as it would not happen.
Your priority will be human users it is important to remember that search engines are a part of the website target audience so always try to make it easy for search engines to recognise the changes that you have made including Domain, structure link and so on SEO planning and attention in the early process increases the probability that you complete the transitions without dropping in search result you might it even come out ahead.
9 factors should be kept in mind is to keep the search engine ranking riding high even after a redesign the first one is to be said as a redirect. If your new website involves a new set of URLs 301 redirects are a must-have 301 redirections inform search engines that the new location has moved permanently this where the search engines know that the new pages have the same or similar content and which is safe to assign the existing rank of the new page even after changing the extension only such as changing it is the case even.
It is important that every page on the old website is set up with its redirects both for SEO purposes and to keep your continue continued visitors running into the old links some site owners try the shortcuts of setting positional redirects that are funerals all the old pages to the homepage of the new website but this annoys users and search engines alike. The second factor is to change of domains.
If the transition from the old website is changed to a new website including change of domain name consider breaking the process down into two separate steps first one move the old website to the new domain setting up redirects for each page on a one-to-one basis after it is done launch the new website on the new domain and double-check it whether its redirects are correct, it will reduce the percentage of going something wrong in this process. You must ensure that the new page has a proper page title and meta descriptions it can be transferred from the old website if it is unique and descriptive of the page content.
The redesign is a great opportunity to focus on creating more search engine friendly meta content if your titles and descriptions are not up to par. You should have your new website first one HTML sitemap for users and search engines and second one XML sitemap for search engines only and XML sitemaps help in search engines crawling and indexing your website faster you can submit XML sitemaps for searching engines like Google and being through the webmaster your visitors can see an Error page that is both user and search engine friendly. It is a vital element even if you have created 301 redirects for all your content on the old website the odds are that users are still coming across broken links from time to time a good 404 page will help the user and search engine to get back on the track in an easy way through using useful links is search box or at the very less redirecting home page, it is also a good idea for the menu of the website on the 4 page for increasing usability. Another factor that could help in redesigning is the robot.txt file.
It is a file that is set to inform search engines about the pages you don’t want to crawl or index it should be updated to match the new URL structure it issues helps to review and update it if you have one on your old website. Always make sure that any development or test websites are not crawled as it can result in duplicate content helps issues in such cases it is a good idea to use robots.txt in blocking the search engines and at the same time for extra security e level add password protection.
Try to avoid broken links always use quality assurance tools such as site improve quality assurance to ensure that there are no broken links on the website even if you have set up 301 redirects for your old content problem can still arise especially if some of the old pages employee absolute URLs in the links instead of relative URL.
The eighth factor is collecting the stats of referring links to the website and identifying the most popular on them the information can be found in analytics for SEO tools such as site improve SEO you would contact the owner of the referring website and appeal for change the link to point to your new page but this is not practically possible so try I contacting the owners alternatively of the most popular backlinks and have these changes make sure that the pages that the rest of the backlinks point to a properly 301 redirects.
The final and last factor is the transition period if you have changed your domain name Google recommends keeping your old domain name within the 301 redirects for at least 180 days as a period of transition by using the change of address tool gives Google’s boats ample time to crawl and index the new pages if you follow this 9 simple tips and factors it would minimise the risks of website disappearing from search ranking in the transition it will help to reach the design your new website if any fault is appearing on the old website.
Credit:-siteimprove.com