Things to consider with regards to SEO when redesigning a website
-
I will be redesigning a website in wordpress. currently the website is html/css based
My concern is i dont want to lose any of the Search engine rankings.
what should i put in place to avoid that situation
-
When you redesign a website, whether utilizing WordPress or any other technology or CMS, there are several things to keep in mind.
I'll first address WordPress. I am a WordPress developer (as well as an expert on various other CMS technologies), and as such WordPress can be very good for any website large and small. However there are many things to consider. First, when you select WordPress you must determine whether you choose to use a template and make modifications either visually or to the code or if you will select a developer to create a custom WordPress theme.
Selecting a Template can be effective but you MUST know the quality. There are so many people and companies out there that provide WordPress templates whether a fixed price for the template or a club membership, but how do you know its any good? I have found over time to trust only a few as many sites out there provide very poor quality templates.
You might be asking how can I define quality in a template and what about these templates, they look good. The visual aspect to your template is of course important, however the quality, especially when it comes to SEO is based on the actual code, html, css, etc. Many developers don't provide quality code, so SEO can and will be affected - ie improper use of header tags, etc.
Over time here are several WordPress vendors that I have found provide great quality:
- ThemeForest this site is by far the best. Their requirements for becoming an author are extreme and they only accept the best. I have been working on selling themes here as well and they look at EVERYTHING to ensure quality.
- WooThemes this site provides excellent themes and they feature some of the best developers on the web!
- StudioPress also offers great themes and high quality.
Now on to plugins. If you have your theme and it provides the quality you desire, utilizing various plugins will ensure that you achieve the desired SEO results you are looking for.
As mentioned by Sha, Yoast SEO is a very good plugin which is found here http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ however I also use All in One SEO and have found it very good for SEO and received great results.
As mentioned you want to make sure that your content is optimized and everything ported over so keeping current links will definitely help. You could also have Google re-index your website.
I also suggest utilizing a Sitemap.xml plugin to ensure that it is constantly up to date: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
If you find that a template is not helping you or meeting your requirements, I would recommend a custom WordPress theme. This will ensure that the website is developed properly for SEO and ensures all plugins will work properly.
There are many other aspects that can play a part in a WordPress built website, but these are the most significant. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer your questions!
Thanks,
- Mark
-
Hi Manuel,
This blog post Web Design Company Fail #1 will give you an idea of some of the things to watch out for when redesigning sites.
One trap with Wordpress sites is inadvertently using a template that has built-in SEO problems, so do some good research on the template you select to make sure that there are no known issues identified.
The other thing is to make sure that you plan right from the start to eliminate the standard duplicate content problems generated by default in Wordpress. Using a good SEO plugin for Wordpress is a good idea for this reason. I find that Yoast SEO for Wordpress is very helpful.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Just regular things: do not change urls, keep content and utilize a design that tends to load fast. No matter what you do there will surely be some moving up and down when you publish the new site. You can consider a link building compaign after finished to show google that people are linkimg to your new site as they are liking it. This should be some great signal to google.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Cached version of website
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the mobile menu links are also coming in text format which looks weird. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:indialetsplay.com&biw=1366&bih=638&noj=1&strip=1 Our coder told us that he has created separate menu i.e. one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. Does the duplicating the menu good for on page SEO? Give the best solution for handling it.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Redesigning client website and will be losing a lot of landing pages. How to avoid tanking search traffic?
We are working with a client who is changing the direction of the company's marketing efforts. The current site includes many (approx 100) pages for each partner they work with (each partner has its own page). The new site will be losing many of these and we want to be sure we don't destroy organic traffic/rankings in the process. These landing pages don't directly garner the most traffic but it will definitely be a big change in the size of the site. Any advice for how to best handle the redesign is appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | KMofOutlier0 -
What price should you pay for seo services
A friend of mine has a business site and he has said to me that he has been receiving a number of emails with regards to seo services. He is seriously thinking about using a company to help him as he does not have the time to promote his site and get it in the top of the search engines. Last week he asked me what price should he be paying for a small business site and to be honest i could not give him an answer as i have never used a company who deal with seo before. A lot of the emails he has received are from India, and i would like to know what is involved, do they need access inside your site and what price is a good price to pay. Normally i would have told him to learn seo himself but due to the lack of time he has i can understand why he needs a company to help him any help would be good
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
SEO url best practices
We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows: Services Student Services Essay editing Essay revision Author Services Book editing Manuscript critique We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing? I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO. Any advice on this is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
Optimizing Flash websites
Does anyone know the latest on how well Google is indexing flash sites? I'm talking to a prospect now whose site is 100% flash, but looking at it all the content within the site is indexed and returning in the results. This is promising enough, but does anyone know exactly how well Google is indexing flash content these days and are there still any problems with that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MattBarker0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
New website, to www or not
I was just wondering if there are any advantages to using the www instead of just the domain name for seo. Can these be elaborated on?
Technical SEO | | simvegas1 -
Does HTTPS Only make a impact on SEO?
Hi. I run a site that's SSL only. (Using a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from http:// to https://). This might be a stupid question but i can't seem to find any conclusive answers to the question by searching. Does this negatively affect the search engine ranking of the site? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Host1
Eivind1