If you are planning to revamp/change the design of your site, please take the following into consideration before you start:
1. Keep the same files naming structure so to make it easier for spiders to re-crawl the new site, and to avoid sending people’s bookmarks to 404 error pages.
2. 301 Redirect all old or changed URLs to the new corresponding page.
- Try always to send users to relevant pages (Mapping).
- Check Google Webmaster tools and look for pages with external links to make sure that you won’t loose any link juice coming from external pages into your old pages.
3. Create 404 error pages so that when errors occur, visitors get a nice message with the site’s look and feel.
It can be also used with pages that cannot be mapped.
- You need to keep monitoring your 404 pages on Google analytics and webmaster tools after launch.
4. Look for broken links that may have come up as the site architecture changes a bit.
5. Create a site map for your visitors so if they feel lost, they have a listing of all the pages on the site.
6. Create an XML site map to submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN to make them aware of all new URLs.
7. Keep the content the same as much as possible to keep any rankings. This ties into #1 as a file name change can also effect rankings.
8. Keep the title tags the same as much as possible to keep any rankings.
9. If changing domains or page names, consider updating links in directories or on other sites if possible. You don’t want to lose those links you previously had. Worst case scenario, 301 redirect them.
10. Tell your SEO before you make the new site live so they can help prevent any issues.
11. If you have feeds in Google News, contact them to change the feed.
12. Keep monitoring your site links.
13. Use Google alerts to keep monitoring your site.
14. Keep an eye on your top keywords in Google Analytics and your rankings in the search engine.
15. Keep monitoring the number of indexed pages in Google index.
16. Keep watching the PR of the site.
17. If you have changed the domain name of the site, keep an eye on the de-indixation of old urls and indixation of new urls.
18. Keep an eye on your backlinks.
19. Did the frequency of update on the new homepage changed?
20. Contact the directories/sites linking to you with old links to change their links to the new one (if changed).
21. Keep working on getting new backlinks.
22. Double check your internal linking structure to push your most important pages.
23. Check Webmaster tools to check if your site is still verified (the Meta tag or html file should still be there).
Notes:
- If changes were made to domain name, the site will take a long time to recover (up to 30 days).
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