Things to consider with regards to SEO when redesigning a website
-
I will be redesigning a website in wordpress. currently the website is html/css based
My concern is i dont want to lose any of the Search engine rankings.
what should i put in place to avoid that situation
-
When you redesign a website, whether utilizing WordPress or any other technology or CMS, there are several things to keep in mind.
I'll first address WordPress. I am a WordPress developer (as well as an expert on various other CMS technologies), and as such WordPress can be very good for any website large and small. However there are many things to consider. First, when you select WordPress you must determine whether you choose to use a template and make modifications either visually or to the code or if you will select a developer to create a custom WordPress theme.
Selecting a Template can be effective but you MUST know the quality. There are so many people and companies out there that provide WordPress templates whether a fixed price for the template or a club membership, but how do you know its any good? I have found over time to trust only a few as many sites out there provide very poor quality templates.
You might be asking how can I define quality in a template and what about these templates, they look good. The visual aspect to your template is of course important, however the quality, especially when it comes to SEO is based on the actual code, html, css, etc. Many developers don't provide quality code, so SEO can and will be affected - ie improper use of header tags, etc.
Over time here are several WordPress vendors that I have found provide great quality:
- ThemeForest this site is by far the best. Their requirements for becoming an author are extreme and they only accept the best. I have been working on selling themes here as well and they look at EVERYTHING to ensure quality.
- WooThemes this site provides excellent themes and they feature some of the best developers on the web!
- StudioPress also offers great themes and high quality.
Now on to plugins. If you have your theme and it provides the quality you desire, utilizing various plugins will ensure that you achieve the desired SEO results you are looking for.
As mentioned by Sha, Yoast SEO is a very good plugin which is found here http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ however I also use All in One SEO and have found it very good for SEO and received great results.
As mentioned you want to make sure that your content is optimized and everything ported over so keeping current links will definitely help. You could also have Google re-index your website.
I also suggest utilizing a Sitemap.xml plugin to ensure that it is constantly up to date: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
If you find that a template is not helping you or meeting your requirements, I would recommend a custom WordPress theme. This will ensure that the website is developed properly for SEO and ensures all plugins will work properly.
There are many other aspects that can play a part in a WordPress built website, but these are the most significant. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer your questions!
Thanks,
- Mark
-
Hi Manuel,
This blog post Web Design Company Fail #1 will give you an idea of some of the things to watch out for when redesigning sites.
One trap with Wordpress sites is inadvertently using a template that has built-in SEO problems, so do some good research on the template you select to make sure that there are no known issues identified.
The other thing is to make sure that you plan right from the start to eliminate the standard duplicate content problems generated by default in Wordpress. Using a good SEO plugin for Wordpress is a good idea for this reason. I find that Yoast SEO for Wordpress is very helpful.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Just regular things: do not change urls, keep content and utilize a design that tends to load fast. No matter what you do there will surely be some moving up and down when you publish the new site. You can consider a link building compaign after finished to show google that people are linkimg to your new site as they are liking it. This should be some great signal to google.
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
-
Some SEO 2016 questions
Hello MOZ Community, I have some questions where the following is still working for seo in 2016: Is an exact keyword in the domain still a good start? If a domain contains the most important keyword does one still need subfolders with that keyword in the url? Do you need multiple subpages so the main url becomes stronger? Is linkbuilding still the number one factor? Thank you for your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | mhenze0 -
Check my website loading time
Kindly check my website loading time for the home page and deep pages. Do I need to make it fast or it is Okey? Website - brandstenmedia.com.au
Technical SEO | | Green.landon0 -
All other things equal, do server rendered websites rank higher than JavaScript web apps that follow the AJAX Crawling Spec?
I instinctively feel like server rendered websites should rank higher since Google doesn't truly know that the content its getting from an AJAX site is what the user is seeing and Google isn't exactly sure of the page load time (and thus user experience). I can't find any evidence that would prove this, however. A website like Monocle.io uses pushstate, loads fast, has good page titles, etc., but it is a JavaScript single page application. Does it make any difference?
Technical SEO | | jeffwhelpley0 -
Website not ranking but the blog is!
I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Are sitewide links bad for SEO?
I have 11 real estate sites and have had links from one to another for about 7 years but someone just suggested me to take them all out because I might get penalized or affected by penguin. My main site was affected on July of 2012 and organic visits have dropped 43%...I've been working on many aspects of my SEO but it's been difficult to come back. Any suggestions are very welcome, thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | mbulox0 -
Domain redirection and seo implications
We have an existing site that is a subdomain but we recently acquired an exact match domain. Will building links to the exact match domain and having the domain point at our existing subdomain work or should we convert the entire site and redirect our existing subdomain to the new domain? What I'm trying to figure out is how to maximize the benefit here and how the existing mass of links pointing to our existing subdomain (shop.domain.com) can be used. New domain: keywordshop.com Existing URL: shop.domain.com
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
How do I resolve Twin domains? redirect website.com to www.website.com?
I am new to this website. Tried to run a campain and got a warning that website.com resolves to www.website.com which hinders SERP by competing for Keyword indexing!. (website is my domain name) Would appreciate help with this. Thanks. S.H. PS: here is the exact wording of error : We have detected that the domain www.yfvaccine.com and the domain yfvaccine.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here.
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Wordpress SEO Errors - Any advice?
Hi all! My site is on the WP platform and I'm having a crawl error. Wondering if you guys could possibly help me figure out what's going on? I have a good number of 404 errors where the links seems to be appended and I can't figure out why. I've scoured my individual posts and cannot seem to find the broken link? The crawl error looks a bit like this: http://preciousthingsphotography.com/2007/12/10/chicago-family-photographer-welcome/http:%2F%2Fpreciousthingsphotography.com%2F2007%2F12%2F10%2Fchicago-family-photographer-welcome%2F You can see that my original link is somehow being doubled with the slashes being replaced? This is happening on all of my posts. Any ideas as to what could be going on? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | ptpgen0