1. Pre­serve Your Link Inven­tory – under­stand where your important/relevant links are com­ing from. Have these sites update their links to point to your new site pages and reclaim your inbound links.

2. Page Size is Impor­tant – too lit­tle text or too much text can neg­a­tively affect how the search engine per­ceives the page’s rel­e­vance. Con­sider your cus­tomer first, and make sure you pro­vide them with the con­tent they need. Ask your­self ‘what is the pur­pose of this web page, why would peo­ple come to it, what do they want to do when they get here, what to do we want them to do, and how do we make it easy for them to do it?’

3. Con­tent is King –when it comes to search engines and their abil­ity to crawl, index and rank web­sites, con­tent is what they are look­ing for. Opti­mize your con­tent for your key phrases.

4. Update Your Sitemaps – this includes your stan­dard HTML sitemap to help cus­tomers nav­i­gate a large web­site, as well as an XML sitemap to help the search engine spi­ders crawl your site.

5. Make Effec­tive use of Text Nav­i­ga­tion and Keyword-Rich Text Links – inter­link­ing of your site pages can ensure that both search engines and human vis­i­tors are able to access all of your impor­tant site content.

6. Opti­mize for Blended Search – opti­mize your images, video, press releases and blog(s) for blended search. This is some­thing that should be ongo­ing but can be eas­ily accom­plished when com­plet­ing a web­site redesign.

7. Map Out Your Site Hier­ar­chy / URL Struc­ture – how you serve up your site’s con­tent can have a dra­matic effect on your search engine rank­ings. Deter­mine if you should use a sub-domain vs. sub-folder strat­egy as you redesign your website.

8. Test Design Changes – set up a test envi­ron­ment to test every­thing from home page mock­ups to site nav­i­ga­tion, and other on-page opti­miza­tion factors.

9. Make Use of 301 Redi­rects – if you need to redi­rect any of your old con­tent to the new site be sure to use 301 (per­ma­nent) redirection.

10. Dynamic vs. Sta­tic URLs – HTML was once con­sid­ered the most accept­able lan­guage to search engine spi­ders for being straight­for­ward and the eas­i­est cod­ing lan­guage to read and index. Search engines tended to give pref­er­ence in rank­ings to static-appearing sites, which, for dynamic sites, was accom­plished by rewrit­ing URLs to change dynamic pages to appear as sta­tic, or actu­ally cod­ing an entire site in HTML. But search engines have made progress! While it is still advis­able to use sta­tic con­tent with sta­tic URLs as much as pos­si­ble as they can have a slight advan­tage in terms of click through rates, the deci­sion to use dynamic URLs does not nec­es­sar­ily mean a dis­ad­van­tage in terms of index­ing and ranking.

TIP: Fol­low Google’s Web­mas­ter Guide­lines to allow Google to find, index, and rank your site and mit­i­gate the risk of los­ing rank­ings in Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

For these and more tips on SEO for Web­site Redesign, look out for our FREE eBook later this month. Included in the eBook:

• 4 Stages of Web­site Redesign
• 8 Mis­takes to Avoid when Redesign­ing your Web­site
• Web­site Redesign Cheat Sheet
• Web­site Redesign Checklist


Biography / Resume : Karl joined Mediative’s service delivery team in 2008. A year later, he moved to the company’s research department where he conducted online surveys, eye-tracking studies, one-on-one interviews and usability testing. Most recently, he transitioned to the marketing department. Before Mediative, Karl worked in sales and marketing. In 1997, he caught the digital bug and became the original “webmaster” for Roland Canada Music. Around the same time, he began teaching the relatively new topic of Internet marketing to college and university students. Karl’s insatiable curiosity and drive to get to the core and substance of every situation has served him well in his various roles at Mediative.