Site Redesign SEO Considerations and Checklist

Making wholesale or even minor site changes is an exciting and challenging time for a business. Making your site bigger and better can promise more traffic, and more business.

However, often the SEO effects of the new site vs. the old are not taken into consideration, resulting in a drop in traffic. Very disappointing!

Whoops! New site and the traffic tanks!

Here’s how to Not have that happen to you!

Before you make any site changes – have analytics in place to fully understand what traffic you are getting and to exactly where.

You must know these elements:
• What keywords/copy are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What graphics are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What videos are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?

Look at the internal site linking structure and map it out. Use your sitemap (and xml sitemap) and create a referral sheet.

As the new site is created, you use this link map referral sheet to make decisions on how to setup the new site and the possible costs/benefits of changing the link scheme. When you are changing the site architecture around, there are effects.

For instance, if you are taking a high traffic page, that is a main navigation tab and moving it to a sub navigation tab, there will be a change in traffic to that page. Being aware of that in the planning stages and taking it into account can minimize the traffic impact.

Look at (…and if extensive, map out) external links into the site using Yahoo Site Explorer and other link finding tools.

Use this as another guideline as to the cost/benefit of changing navigation and site structure, navigation, naming conventions, etc. As much as possible, you want to avoid changing your site structure so that you do not break all links of sites that link to you.

Clearly, this is not always possible. Having this map though will allow you to create an intelligent 301/302 redirect scheme that makes the links still lead to the information that other sites originally linked to, rather than a broken link.

As you plan and build the new site, it is important to keep track of the below areas and how they will effect your SEO:
• Site architecture: the overall category/site section scheme, navigation, naming conventions and URL’s – how will changes here affect the search engine referrals and what can be done to compensate?
• Pages – what pages are going to be deleted and what keywords, content and links (internal and external) will this effect?
• What pages are moving within the site structure and how does that effect their importance?
• Home Page – what internal links are changing and what will the effect be on the links to the home page?
• Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, title tags – which are changing and how will this effect search engine referrals?

Checklist

1. Analytics in place on current site tracking:
• What keywords/copy are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What graphics are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What videos are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?

2. Map out current site internal linking structure – use site map and create a referral sheet/map

3. Map out external links into the site. Use this to create a re-direct scheme for the new site.

4. Site architecture: the overall category/site section scheme, navigation, naming conventions and URL’s – how will changes here affect the search engine referrals and what can be done to compensate?

5. Pages – what pages are going to be deleted and what keywords, content and links (internal and external) will this effect? Do these pages need to be deleted?

6. What pages are moving within the site structure and how does that effect their importance? What will the SEO effect be?

7. Home Page – what internal links are changing and what will the effect be on the internal links to the home page?

8. Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, title tags – which are changing and how will this effect search engine referrals?