How to avoid SEO disaster while redesigning your website

Do you want to launch a new version of your website to enhance its usability and functionality? Whatever may be the reason and purpose for the redesign, your website’s SEO should be high up on your checklist.

Before you start building a new website, it is very essential to think how your redesign will impact your SEO. Otherwise your website may face traffic loss and significant down on its organic reach.

In order to avoid traffic loss and conquer search engines, here are a few tips to consider:

Ensure if the content is Indexable

For any web page to rank in search engine, it must be indexed by its crawlers, which in turn delivers the data to the servers of the search engine and keep it in its library.

Indexable-Content

The web crawlers can only index data that is compatible with search engine guidelines as follows:

# Any kind of content that wants to be indexed must be written in HTML.

# Images that are to be indexed must contain ALT tags.

# If the website has audio or video content, you must include a transcript in order to be indexed.

# Avoid using restricted pages that are accessible only via passwords, as they are not indexable by search engine bots.

# If you don’t have any purpose of hiding web pages, then avoid using robots.txt which tells user not to crawl the page and store in its index.

Set 301 Redirection to Fix Broken Links

Your redesigned site’s structure should be in a way that it should compromise your inbound links that are targeting your old URLs. To do this, you have to set redirection for all the pages whose URLs are being changed as they can still provide you with some SEO link juice.

301-ReDirection

Do it by creating a list of all the URLs of your website, identify the pages that are to be rerouted and set 301 permanent redirections to all those pages. You may use Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to create such list.

Reformat URL Structures

Crawlers do not pass to the URLs that have improper URL structure. Not all the URL structure is immune to the search engine bots.

For example:

http://www.example.com/4567891234abcdefgh

But, the preferred URLs shall look like:

http://www.example.com/category-keyword/primary-keyword.html

Usually following hierarchy must be following for an SEO-friendly URL structure:

Protocol, Domain, Top-Level Domain and then category, page, named anchor, extension

While redesigning your website, you can audit your website using website auditor to detect unformatted pages.

The migration process can usually take time, but it is quite useful to increase your SEO impact on your newly designed website to safeguard its search engine traffic and ranking.

Hope these tips might be helpful for you to redesign your existing website without hurting its SEO.

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