SEO: Your Next Website Redesign Could Save Your Life and Some Cash – Dr. Naveel Brings the SEO Preventative Medicine
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Written By Dr. Naveel | July 15, 2008 | Share This
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You own a successful brick and mortar business. Everyone likes your store and you have lots of satisfied customers. You have an ideal location, at the crossroads of all the major routes in town. Business is good, but you feel it’s time to update the look and feel of your store to give it a more modern flair. So, you embark on the challenging process of renovation. After finding the right people to do the job you decide to take a well-deserved vacation, trusting them to get the job done in your absence. When you return you’re excited to find a brand new, cutting edge store with all the latest bells and whistles. Wait until your customers to see it! Just one problem – during the redesign your store was moved without your knowledge! Your once-perfect locale is no more – your store is on the fringe of town in the middle of a cowpatch. Now, you’re stuck with a beautiful new store that customers can’t find. Business plummets and you’re in fire drill mode to get those customers back from the retail twilight zone. Far-fetched? Unfortunately, this happens every day on the web. When you redesign your website without considering search engines you’re essentially removing it from public view and making it extremely difficult for your audience to find.
Building is Half the
It’s been said that when climbing a mountain, celebrating at the summit is the last thing you want to do. Why? Because you still have to descend and that can be more dangerous than the climb. I’m willing to bet that right now in the boardroom of a major organization there is group of executives, designers, technology and marketing professionals all very excited on their mountaintops over the launch of a shiny new website. And they should be, it’s an exciting time, but it’s not the end of the journey. Today there are a number of people who find your website through organic search. At this very moment there is probably someone typing a search term into Google and hitting return. Your website is showing up first so the user clicks through. This could even represent the biggest source of traffic for your website. If you think that number is going to remain constant or improve with a redesign that hasn’t taken search engines into account you’re in for a rude awakening. It’s possible to lose virtually all your organic search traffic with a redesign. The earlier in the redesign process you start thinking about search, the better. Your organization can save time and money by incorporating SEO while your website is being built instead of modifying the website after it’s been launched. Building a great website that no one can find doesn’t benefit anyone. Don’t climb a mountain without a plan to get back down.
Search Engines Don’t Like Websites That Are Invisible
Revisiting our brick and mortar store for a moment: Bad enough that your business was moved to nowhere, now just imagine if it was invisible, too! That’s what happens when attempts to “modernize” your website rely too heavily on rich media like flash or dynamic elements like
Visitors see a rich, dynamic user interface that is consistent with the TV advertising campaign.
Search Engines see an improperly formatted image statement, a link to download the latest version of flash and another link that points back to the same page. None of these things are going to help search engine rankings. Essentially, this page has no chance of ranking for anything else but the LG Scarlet brand name and therefore missing out on huge amounts of generic search term volume.
Don’t Send Users To Nowhere
Over the years your website has developed hundreds if not thousands of links on other sites that point back to it. These could be links from news articles, blogs, directories – any webpage really. Links are very valuable to your website and are hard to attain. They can be a major source of click-through traffic for your website. Search engines also use these links to determine what your page is about and how relevant it is. Now picture your organization flushing all that link equity down the toilet in one fell swoop. That’s what happens when your new website structure doesn’t take into account the structure of the old one. All those valuable links from other websites are now potentially broken. When a user clicks on one of these links they don’t find what they’re looking for or worse get the dreaded 404 error page – “Page Not Found”. That’s what search engines see, too. A URL redirection plan is critical for delivering a solid user experience and preserving your existing link equity with search engines.
Failure to Plan is Planning for Failure
Nothing quite sums it up like an awesome business cliché! Remember, your organization can save time, money and fire drills by including SEO in the redesign process from the outset.
Topics: ECommerce, SEO, Search: How-To |
SEO can make or break a website - that’s for sure! Many business owners simply don’t understand the true importance.