Redesigning website keeping SEO secrets in view
All good things come to an end one day; even your laboriously designed website can become obsolete, if not updated regularly. If you want to redesign your website to keep inline with the changing trends-first hire an acclaimed company with perfect knowledge of the working of search engine. We have valid and logic reasons behind giving importance to search engine, two of these are:
a) You don’t lose your old traffic
b) You receive new visitors, when the new site goes on internet live
Here we would like to discuss some of the key SEO secrets, which may assist you in developing your world class new website:
a) Creating SEO site architecture
Search engines be it Google or Yahoo works on certain mechanism, they visualize all your web pages and their link pages and decide their place or positioning within the site. Pages with linkage with every other page are given more consideration than those pages that only have linkage with few others. Technically it is known as internal page rank.
Recommendation
Remember that you don’t bury your previous content bringing traffic for your website. Make sure that any content with rich keyword is placed high up in your site hierarchy. Content present in a particular category should be cross-linked using sub-navigation within that specific section.
b) Deciding category and avoiding duplicate content
You should keep in mind that people browse search engine for information, issue or business, therefore you should categorise your web content in a professional way. The more categories you have in your content for various target visitors, the better you serve your visitors.
Recommendation
Make sure that all top level key pages caters to the requirements of potential customers and should be such that they solve queries and problems of the customers. Further, ensure that your visitors end up at your website’s URL while looking for service or product. Let us understand this with an example, if a particular product can be classified both in product and service category, it should be categorized in both the categories. Nevertheless, make sure that the page customers visit regardless of category should be same.
c) New Content Management and Changing URLs
In case, if URLs are altered in the redesign owing to new content or back-end coding, search engine may take little time for indexing. Search engine might take some time in providing the weightage given to your old URLS, just have patience.
Recommendation
Ensure that you redirect all old URLs to their linked part within the restructured website. It will help in passing link popularity of the old URLs to the newly made URLs swiftly. One way to ensure this is that the new URLs are named similar to old ones.
d) Coding of Navigation Menus
You have to make sure that the links contained in the navigation of your website are coded in accordance with the search engine’s working mechanism. For example some DHTML flash menus are invisible to search engines, and pages linked within them don’t receive internal popularity they deserve.
Recommendation
You have to make sure that in your new website all navigational menus are coded with CSS, it is visible and readable to diverse search engines. Also do away with drop-down box links as the main form of navigation, more over ensure that the entire content is accessible through hard-coded links.
e) HTML Elements
You have to make sure that your new website’s content management system assists you in creating custom description for titles, metas, headers, URLs and alt, although some level of automation is advisable.
Recommendation
Ensure that your new website’s content management system has fields for customisation of title tags, meta description, heading tags and others. Character limit should not be there in these fields as every page has different requirement.
f) Session IDs and other tracking links
Don’t use session IDs to track visitors, its in your website’s interest, in case you want to use them then only feed the clean URLs for search engine spider. Avoiding this may land your URLs in an infinite loop, getting indexed the same content under multiple URLs.
Recommendation
If this type of tracking is inbuilt in your system then use the canonical link element in order to manage one URL for every page of content.
We are sure using above suggestion; you will develop world class website fitting search engine requirements.