Redesign Your Website Without Killing SEO
It’s time for your website to get a facelift, you have looked at different CMS platforms, countless web designs, UX, IA, the acronym list goes on and on. There’s one critical piece that you don’t want to forget … your SEO team!
The SEO team should be involved from the very beginning but here are 5 tasks that are an absolute must:
- Information Architecture (IA)
Bring the SEO team in to help analyze the hierarchy of the website. They will ensure that the website is organized for maximum crawlability and setup for search engine success.
- Content
Content will change from the old version of the website to the new one. The SEO team should be part of the process to ensure that the content is optimized for current rankings and future rankings. Also, please ensure that the development site or beta site is excluded from the search engines. There’s nothing worse than a duplicate content issue from the very beginning.
- Redirect Document
Things are changing and some pages will no longer be. Have the team go through the old site versus the new site to ensure all old URLs are using a 301 redirect to the new URL. This keeps rankings high and ensures a great UX.
- Page Speed
The SEO team should go through the new site to ensure responsive design and page speeds for both mobile and desktop. They may suggest image, JavaScript, and CSS optimization as a result. P.S. Flash is a bad word!
- Analytics
Tracking codes need to be placed throughout the website as well as triggers, events, and goals being updated to reflect new URLs. Post launch the team will go through and do some benchmarking.
Remember, you don’t want to lose all the hard work you have done in the past. It may not be possible to have the SEO team involved in every step of the process getting their input in these 5 tasks will help you get through the reindexing process!
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