Perhaps the most crucial time to pay attention to your website’s search engine rankings and traffic patterns is during a website redesign. If you depend on your website to gain new customers, maintain current customers or generate leads in any form (phone calls, form submission, in store visits, etc.) then maintaining or improving your website’s visibility and traffic during a website redesign is crucial.

The “if you build it they will come” mentality does not fair well with search engines when building or rebuilding a website, no matter how well-designed the new website may be. Close attention needs to be paid to all incoming traffic sources. In order to keep receiving traffic from all of your most valuable sources (inbound links, search engines, directory listings, etc.) specific SEO elements must be in place.  A period of lower traffic can not always be avoided completely when undergoing a redesign, but these tips should help you avoid major search engine traffic losses and help build on your long term search engine presence.

Content Development

Whether or not you had keyword-optimized content on your old website, you should seriously consider performing extensive keyword research BEFORE new website copy is developed. Search behavior is always changing, and keyword research should be performed at least once a year to make sure that you are still targeting the correct keywords. A website redesign presents the perfect opportunity to optimize your content or refresh your already optimized content.

A website redesign is also a great time to optimize the structure of the content within each of page so that it displays a hierarchy of importance. Getting your most important keywords to occupy the best real estate of each page is an extremely important factor when targeting more competitive terms.

Most importantly, there should be optimized HTML content on every page of the site. And yes, this includes the home page. Text inside of images and (in several cases) text embedded inside Flash can not be read by search engines. Make sure that all content that can possibly be displayed in text is converted to HTML.

URL Optimization

If your website URLs are not set up to include the keywords you are optimizing for, a redesign is a perfect time to make the switch to optimized URLs. When restructuring your site architecture, try to minimize the depth of directories for the pages you are optimizing and incorporate important targeted keywords in the URLs. Try to keep the keywords for top level pages more broad than keywords used in URLs for more granular content. This will allow you greater flexibility if you decide to change your keyword targets on a top level page.

Several companies think their URL structure options are limited because they are using a content management system, but several CMS’s will allow you to choose how you want your internal pages structured. Do your research before deciding that optimized URLs are not an option.

Setting up Redirects

If you are changing your URL structure in any way, this step is crucial to maintain search engine visibility and traffic from inbound links. Utilizing 301 redirects helps search engines understand what new pages should be ranked in place of your old pages. It also helps pass Google PageRank from one page to another. These redirects also prevent you from having to find every instance of inbound links from other websites and request that traffic be directed to a new URL. If redirects are implemented correctly, all existing inbound links should drive traffic to a functioning (non-404) and relevant page.

Design

Make sure that your new website design doesn’t limit you from building new and valuable content. You should easily be able to expand pages to add new copy. Your website navigation should be set up to allow you to add or remove navigational items as your company changes or expands. This is especially necessary if you anticipate creating a company blog in the future. Blogs are a great way to build content that attracts the “long tail” of search engine terms. Whatever your future endeavors might be, make sure you don’t trap yourself into a design that doesn’t allow for change.