SEO Resources - Frequently Asked Questions
How do I Maintain my Rankings when Re-designing my Website?
Many Webmasters and business owners come to a point where they realize it is in their best interest to rebuild an existing website. Some sites were built with aging methods that are no longer considered up to snuff with web standards. Others are downright bulky and don't utilize the true power of CSS to create dynamic designs without muddying up your source code. Others still use JavaScript for image rollovers where CSS can operate faster. There are many more reasons why you might want to rebuild your site - what's important is knowing how not to lose the ranks you've worked so hard to get.
Every website is of course quite different from another in most cases. With that in mind it is difficult to make any blanket statements. For one thing, if your site doesn't enjoy high rankings to begin with you are probably best advised not to worry about maintaining your position. For sites that do rank highly, however, maintaining position can be of huge importance.
The structure of a well-ranked website is vastly important. This should be of the utmost importance to you when you set out to redesign your site. In other words, your redesign, while it might be necessary for a variety of reasons, probably should not mean that you're restructuring the URLs of your site or renaming files. When you rename a file or change a folder name, or alter the path leading to files dramatically, you are running the very real risk of falling in Search Engine rankings a great deal.
probably the most important tool in preventing a drastic drop in your rankings is the 301 redirect. This is a means of redirecting the user to one page from another. It happens on the server side of things, so if you are a Webmaster who doesn't have access to these tools you'd be wise to contact your host and make sure you can utilize the 301 redirect. Along with the information you redirect the user to, you are redirecting the Reddit for that pages rankings. So long as the content maintains its relevance this is a good way to stay where you are in the rankings. If you change your domain name you are running the risk of significantly losing your rankings. While it is still recommended that you utilize the 301 redirect, there are times when a site's rankings are determined a great deal by the domain name. For example, if your company name and domain name contain a target key word for which you are ranking highly, an example being "www.JohnsTaxService.com" which would naturally rank highly for a "tax service" Search, all other factors being equal. No amount of preparation will completely guard against the drop in rankings for this Search term if the domain is changed to "www.JohnTheAccountant.com." For this reason it is advisable that no redesign of your site should include a new domain name unless absolutely necessary.
Another important factor is to make sure that you redirect the user to either your homepage or to a custom 404-error page. For obvious reasons it isn't a good idea to have a user landing on a generic 404-error page. It can really dissuade potential customers and Search Engines alike.
Site navigation is a big part of making your site Search Engine friendly. It naturally follows, then, that when you redesign your site you want to maintain as much of your navigation structure as possible. If you suddenly restructure your navigation menus and file organization you are running the risk of losing your position.
When it comes to Flash content, many Webmasters and designers get in over their heads. There is no doubt that Flash can lend an immense amount of aesthetic quality to a website. What it does not do, however, is allow Search Engine crawlers to parse its content. In other words, anywhere you have flash you are giving your content up to aesthetics and nothing else. For companies with massively popular brands or who simply don't care about their rankings Flash might be considered. For smaller companies who rely on their Search Engine rankings to bring in most, or any, of their business redesigning their site to be entirely made up of Flash can be a big mistake.
There is a happy medium here, however. Often referred to as "spot-Flash," this technique involves just what the term implies - the use of Flash in "spots" but not over the bulk of your site. This means that text and images, and any other facets of your site that don't need to be flash, are kept static. Your site still has HTML code, containing as much as possible to feed the Search Engines, and the Flash content is kept to where it really needs to be.
Another key point when redesigning your site is ensuring that your Meta and Title tags carry over to the new design exactly as they were. Your page descriptions and keywords are important for SEO, as are your document titles.
It follows then that your keyword densities and content should also carry over as much as possible. Your Meta tags need to be relevant to your content or they will mostly likely be ignored by Search Engines or even marked as "spamming."
As a general rule, when redesigning your existing site you should change only what absolutely needs to be changed if you are interested in maintaining your Search Engine rankings. Site structure, Meta tags, content, URLs, document tiles - all of these are factors that influence your current SEO. If you are interested in maintaining your current position you should take steps to keep as much of this as unchanged as you possibly can. Where you need to change URLs or file names, make use of 301 redirects. Where pages that once existed are removed, ensure that users and Search Engines won't receive a generic 404 "page not found" error. You've worked hard to get where you are, so bear in mind that you'd do well to hang on to whatever of your hard work that you can.
