SEO Checklist For Your Website Redesign | Web Hosting Demystified

All right, you’ve decided to redesign your website and you’ve found the perfect designer or design company to do so. Excellent, a site redesign is sometimes a necessary step as your business grows but what you should be careful of is to not lose the goodwill that you have built up with the search engines.

The following is a checklist that I would ensure my website design team understands and will take care of in the new design.

1. Existing url’s - A very important factor in maintaining your site rankings. I would try and ensure that I stick to the same url’s going forward as much as I can. This assumes ofcourse that your website url’s were optimized in the first place.

   If for some reason you have to change your url’s then ensure you do the next point.

2. 301 Redirect - Setup 301 redirects for all those url’s on your website you plan to change. The best way to go about doing this is to spread them evenly on all important pages on your new site. So don’t redirect them all to the home page but evenly distribute them to the top 10 sub pages or categories.
3. Watch out for duplicate content - Quite often I see webmasters have both the new version and the old version running together and while the design has changed, most of the content remains the same. You are better off avoiding having duplicate content within the same domain, it does cause a dilemma for the search engines. Which page is the most relevant one? Why make the search engines guess. Avoid this completely.
4. Create a new sitemap - You will be surprised how many webmasters forget this step. Create or update your XML and your HTML sitemaps to reflect your new website design. This will ensure that the search engines find and index all of the new pages quickly.
5. Changing Hosting companies - Often, site owners change their hosting provider when they go in for a redesign. Usually the new web designer ends up referring a new hosting company or the webmaster finds a web hosting package that will meet his or her site’s growing needs. The key point to keep in mind while doing this is to keep your downtime to a minimum. If you can move your website hosting company without any downtime then nothing like it.

It is always wise to involve your SEO firm or consultant in the redesign process from the very start. Optimizing your website design is a crucial factor for attaining that ranking. A site redesign is an opportunity to do this.

As always, keep coming back for more tips on search engine optimization, web hosting and website maintenance tips tricks and tutorials. Do also stop by my SEO Challenge page and let me know what you think.

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