Website Revision
-
Hi all~
We are completely remaking our website: www.containmydog.com.
I believe we have a good handle on the visual aspects of the redesign. What are the backend or behind the scenes (probably not using the technical term) things that need to be done so search engines know where things are. For example i know we are not going to remove some pages , change were some pages are on the site and add new pages.
Is there a checklist that lists the important things to do when designing/redesigning a website? If there is not a checklist what are the things I should be asking the web person we hire?
-
Here is two more excellent piece that ties and a lot of the most essential things.
http://www.sytian-productions.com/blog/web-design/the-ultimate-seo-guide-for-website-redesign/
Great tool for site inventory and redistribution.
All the best,
Tom
-
Moosa
one of the things bothering me the most when I left my response was not talking about UX and other Good call man thumbs up.
I am doing three redesigns and think you put it perfectly.
Hi Steve,
five second rule. See https://usabilityhub.com/tests/new/FiveSecondTest
You asked the great question and I want to be sure I answered all of it. Some excellent UX tips are right here.
http://www.usertesting.com/blog/2014/03/12/7-user-testing-templates-for-marketers/
All the best,
Tom
-
When you are redesigning the website and you already have a handle on the design part meeting the aesthetics.
You need to remember about the developer who will be implementing that new look.
I like to start off with a site map where you can create the navigation for your website. This will obviously matter quite a bit because you want the URLs to point like a pyramid I will show you in a photo.
I cannot stress how important it is to 301 redirect URLs that are changing with the old version of the rewritten URL or the most relevant. Please remember if it's not relevant and it does not have back links it can be 404ed or better 410ed
I strongly suggest you purchase deep crawl or screaming frog I believe the combination is ideal but take a look at them.
- http://deepcrawl.co.uk/use-cases/site-redevelopment & h
- http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
- Use this with the tools above
- http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/
reachability is important you need to have a site architecture that does not take the user to many clicks away from the home page. alexa.com $49 not bad.
better illustrated here
http://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo
in case the photograph is too small here is a larger URL so you can read the tips the bottom one that's cut off is very important
- http://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/img_uploads/flattened-to-3-levels-deep.jpg
- http://cl.ly/Zy6H/Image 2015-02-26 at 10.29.46 PM.png
- http://d.pr/f/1lNK7
- If you consider revising your linking structure.
info on how not to use link juice when doing 301's please read
Awesome guide / info from hub spot
- http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/website-redesign-resources-you-need-ht
- http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13220778-pdf/docs/ebooks/10-step-checklist-website-redesign.pdf
Kiss metrics and crazy egg or Neil Patel
- http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/05/02/seo-website-redesign/
- http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/01/15/website-redesign-strategy/
- http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/06/26/website-redesign-guide/
- https://blog.kissmetrics.com/website-redesign-in-2014/
Additional helpful information.
- http://cubicleninjas.com/9-step-website-redesign-checklist/
- http://cubicleninjas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Website-Redesign-Checklist.pdf
I do not want to overwhelm you but it is very serious when you are redesigning a website.
I recommend hiring Greg Reindel if you are already using WordPress and I can tell you are on a great server using Genesis most likely?
http://www.gregreindel.com/ ( he helped create Genesis 2.0)
http://www.billerickson.net/wordpress-consulting/psd-to-genesis/
let me know if you're talking about SEO's as well as developers?
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
I am actually happy that you are not one of those who believe that the importance of website is nothing but a company display! When you are redesigning your website this time you probably should consider the following things in-mind regardless of what CMS systems you use and what kind of design you have.
- It should not take 3 to 5 seconds for your website to display its first page to your target audience.
- Design and navigation should be easy enough for a visitor to continue their journey on the website instead of bouncing right after landing on the website.
- Clear call to action so that he can easily convert in to lead and customer if he wants.
There are more ideas as well. Here is the checklist from hubspot that you should consider important when redesigning your website. http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13220778-pdf/docs/ebooks/10-step-checklist-website-redesign.pdf
If you managed to create your website using this checklist not only your search engine visibility gets better but it will also help you increase your conversion rate as well as your website will be much more user friendly as it is at the moment.
Hope this help!
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
-
Migrating website to new CMS and to https://
Hi, We are migrating an old website to a new one built in Wordpress soon. We also added an SSL to change to https:// Most of the url's stay the same. Can we just migrate from http to https on server level, and for the url's that do change just set a 301 redirect? Or are there other things we should take into account?
Technical SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Page Speed/Website Optimization Question
We recently relaunched our website and after running multiple page speed tests (GT Metrix, Google, etc.) our results aren't great. We would love any suggestions on how to improve our site as we are not experts in what exactly these results mean - https://gtmetrix.com/reports/loyalty360.org/DKRN0hKg. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Server 500: website deindexed?
Hi mozzers, Since August 22nd, (not a site I manage) has had a Server error 500 and all the pages got deindexed? This is obviously a server issue but why it got deindexed is it because it's been a while since it had this server issue? On the pages I checked the pages loads correctly so I am a bit confused here! His webmaster account show 1500 server errors! Can someone tell me what is going on and how to fix it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Canonicalization on my website
I am kind of new to all this but I would like to understand canonicalization. I have a website which when you arrive on it is www.mysite.com but once inside and flicking back to the homepage it reverts to www.mysite.com/index.html. Should I be doing something re canonicalization? If so what? Will the link juice be diluted by having two home page versions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FCAbroad0 -
Redirecting website page to another
Hi there one of my old pages on my site is currently ranking for a phrases that I want to rank for on a new page I created. My old page from 1 year ago is ranking for 'Property Management Training' (it's a blog post dating 2011) I have cretaed a new main Page on my site and would like to rank for 'Property Management' as it's more relevant. What is the best suggestion to keep my ranking but have people go to my new page? 301 redirect old page to new page? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | daracreative1 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
Technical SEO | | SEOed0 -
What are SEO factors in re-doing a website?
Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here. If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory? What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?
Technical SEO | | bvalentine0