SEO After A Redesign – What To Worry About?

Regardless of how awesome the design of your website is, there's going to come a day where it's time for an update.  It's the reason that FastWebUpdates is in business and a fact that we're very happy about.  All jokes aside when it comes to redesigning your website it's not only about look and feel.  You can have the best looking website in the world but if no one can find you then it's worthless.  That's where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in.  This crucial piece of your online visibility is often overlooked during the redesign process.

Redirects – if you've moved to a new platform, added a CMS (content management system), have added e-commerce, etc. then in all likelihood you've got URLs that have changed.  This is pretty common during a redesign and if you don't take the proper precautions you may lose those valuable natural search rankings you've built.   You need to make sure that search engines and your visitors can find the location of any content they may have had bookmarked in the past.  The easiest way to do this is create 301 redirects on old pages.  Essentially this tells the visitor, "Hey… you know that page you were looking for?  It's over here now," and points them in the right direction.  The use of 301 redirects avoids the dreaded "404 – Page Not Found" error.

Custom 404 Pages -  Speaking of the dreaded 404 – Page Not Found error.  Unfortunately they're bound to happen.  Especially when you've got a big site there will be one that slips through that you don't catch.  If you've got a custom 404 page you can provide your user with a friendlier version of that message and perhaps with some additional content that will point them in the right direction.  It gives you the ability to explain perhaps WHY the page no longer exists and to suggest some alternate content.  At the very least you should provide the user a short list of your most popular pages and your site's navigation.

Check Your Content – In all likelihood you did this as part of your redesign project but you want to give your site structure a once over to make sure you haven't inadvertently duplicated content.  It's OK to have the same "message" in multiple places on your site (in fact that's a good thing) but having the exact same content on different URLs is a big no no.  It'll actually hurt your search engine rankings.

Title Tags – I think it goes without saying but you should NOT have the same title tag for every page of your website.  If you do, your redesign is a good time to remedy that situation.  Create title tags that are specific to the page you're on that are descriptive without being too wordy.   Alt Tags – To a search engine, images don't exist.  You need to tell the engine what it's looking at.  Alt tags are your opportunity to do just that.  As an example the image above is called "redesign.jpg" and to a search engine that's all they see.  They have no idea what it looks like, how big it is, etc.  However, I added an Alt tag that says, "Little white man splashes blue paint against the wall".  So now, when a search engine comes by they now that it's an image of a little guy throwing paint.

There's obviously a ton more that goes into good search engine optimization but this short list should give you a decent start.  With any project the more forethought you can give to these items the easier it's going to be to check these things off your list after your new site is live.  If you have questions about these or any other SEO activities please don't hesitate to contact us.