Re-designing your website could be the beginning of the end of its fair PageRank!
The scenario: You’ve got a new cooler design.
That’s ok, so far. Now sit down and think carefully whether your designer is as good SEO or social media specialist as designer.
There are a lot of reasons why your PageRank (value of your site on search engines, the holly tablets) could be lost, and Re-designing a website brings most of them up. I’m not a professional SEO as my partner is, but I can tell you a few of them, but most important, in colloquial language.
Redirects:
A newer website mostly comes with new technology, most likely to make it dynamic. The pages url will surely change to something different, e.g. from www.yourdomain.com/pagename.html to www.yourdomain.com/products/pagename. Having the proper redirects ready for the moment when your new site goes live is mandatory to prevent Google lose all your existing page’s value.
Proper Coding
New designs are made in CSS and boost page-indexing on search engines. The styles are kept in a separate page, and only the content is indexed. That and anything else that optimizes indexing rewards your PageRank. Designing your website in Flash or using tables will ruin the new content value. Make sure your designer is using CSS layouts, and most of all, the structure of the data makes sense when broken down following heading sizes hierarchy. That means, SEs use the heading sizes as you would to figure out what title belongs to what, and thus their importance.
One way to know whether it right, is to open the page in Firefox, and checking menu View/Page Style/No Style, and make sure the content follows a hierarchical structure, and you can tell what belongs to what title.
Right Keywords
New developers usually try to show you how wrong was the previous developer. One of the consequences, is your new developer trying to grab more keywords than you need, making your site less specific. Try to use keywords that gives MOST of your business, make sure they are those your customers are using to find your services, and leave out the ones you “think” you need, or you “wish” you could get. It’s better to create a new site than trying to cover many categories that can’t be effectively nested into another good ranking one.
Sociability / Interaction
New websites have to fight with many others that do have SEO on them. The longer you stay with the same technology and optimization, the more probable is your competitors do a better job and your site get positioned lower and lower in SEs. Try to add new social techniques and technology, like blogs, comments, forums, reviews, marketing campaigns pointing to facebook, twitter… or any other user interaction method.
Update-ability
New technology comes in many flavors, but the most liked ones survive more seasons.
If you get a custom designed site, there’s a good part of it that needs to be update-able, or your investment will get old too soon along with its technology. Using an open source state-of-the-art-framework, like WordPress or Drupal, is the best way to stay updated, even more after you finished your payments for development.
Make sure to invest as much on open source renew-able technology as in customization, to prevent owning a custom deprecated solution.
About the author:Sergio Zambrano
Print designer until it started to die, Web Designer by hobby and Coder by force. Living in Miami and getting less sun than russians in winter, but I like Wordpress develpment even more.
