You have just completely re-done your website and it looks amazing! So, what about your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? SEO is very important for making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Did the company that re-did your site offer you SEO services to optimize your site afterwards? After doing a website redesign it is very important to have an SEO professional go through your site to ensure that all pages were redirected properly and everything has been optimized.

 

Arrow Root Media recently re-designed a website for Daxor Corporation, Inc. After we finished our re-design, we performed an SEO Audit on the site to identify any errors and warnings that we may have missed during the process. We uncovered several issues, submitted these findings to them with a game plan on how to improve their new site’s performance in the search engines and immediately got to work correcting these issues. We optimized every page on their site including news posts and blog posts.

Here are some important things that need to be looked at after any website re-design:

Redirects

Redirects are one of the most important things to think about during a website redesign. Ensuring that proper pages are redirected to the correct location is vital to your existing SEO. These redirects tell search engines to rank the new page instead of ranking the old one that doesn’t exist anymore.

• Redirects should always be 301 redirects. These will tell the search engines to pass the rankings from your old pages to the new pages. In addition, they will send your users to the correct page.
• All pages that are redirected should be redirected to a similar page and not just to the home page or a non-relevant page

When redirects are not done at all or done correctly, Google will reset the value of the new pages that were created. These pages will go to a 404 page not found and drop out of the rankings. A lot of times this causes a loss in rankings and in traffic.

 

Site Architecture

Site Architecture is the process of how the pages are organized on the site and linked together to make sense. Google passes value from one page to the next based on where the pages are located on the website as well as internal links. Pages that a closer knit to the home page or other major pages on the site will rank higher than those that are lower in the hierarchy.

Each page has a topic or focus keyword/phrase that Google values it for and ranks it for that keyword/phrase that has been assigned to that page. Each target keyword/phrase requires a certain amount of value, or a certain score to compete with other websites in the search results targeting that same target keyword/phrase.

When a website changes how the site architecture is set up, it can cause some pages to have less internal links, or be linked to pages that may have less value to pass on. It is important that your SEO professional make the necessary changes to the site’s architecture properly as to get the best ranking from the search engines.

Content

Changing content on your site after a website design can cause Google to re-evaluate the relevancy of the page for the target keyword/phrase. If priority keywords are removed from important areas (Title, Body content, meta description and SEO titles), the relevancy score will drop and overall rankings and traffic will drop as well.

Having an SEO professional go through your site with a fine tooth comb to uncover where all the errors and warnings may be hiding after your re-design is the best way to prevent any loss in traffic. In fact, with your rocking new site and SEO re-integrated, your traffic should actually improve.

 

Let Arrow Root Media help you with your SEO and ensure that your site is functioning properly.

 

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