What should I expect after completely redoing a website?

[pano]

Hello Forum,

My team and I have completely redone an eCommerce website, which offers new SEO-friendly URLs. We have also taken care to optimize our product and category pages for specific keywords, so as to keep our regular traffic and increase the long-tail.

In the old un-optimized website, many of its Google search results simply took users to the homepage, thus the homepage has a lot of external link juice. Our new site is optimized so that users are taken to the page most relevant to their query. For example (we are a yoga site), with the old site a search for "yoga bolsters" would take visitors to the homepage. Now the search results take the users to the yoga bolster page.

These new pages don't have the amount of external links as the new site and I've noticed a decrease in our site's average rank in Google Webmaster Tools

1.Given our new site with its new URLs, should this increase be expected? (we have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new)

2. What steps would you take to ensure you keep your rankings with the new site? Are they any special tools you recommend?

3. What the best way to increase the ones that have dropped? Page optimization? Link building? Both?

[RyanKent]

A few steps to take:

• Ensure your 301 redirects are working properly. More specifically, each redirect should complete in a single hop. Correct any cases where a URL is redirected multiple times.

• Set up a 404 page on the new site and monitor any traffic to the page. If you notice any URLs repeatedly appearing determine the source and fix it.

• For phrases which you have built new pages, use anchor text from the old page to direct users and search engines to the new page. For example, if you mention "yoga bolsters" on your home page, use it as anchor text and provide an internal link to your /yoga-bolsters page.

• Work to ensure each page on your site targets a single keyword or phrase. Provide internal linking as appropriate. For example any time "yoga bolsters" is mentioned on any page of your site, the first mention should be anchor text to your /yoga-bolsters page. You can use Wikepedia as an example in this regard.

• Update any backlinks you control. If you control a link to your home page with the text "yoga bolsters", change the link to the new page.

• Crawl your site using the SEOmoz crawl tool or something similar. Make sure your site is solid (i.e. no broken links, no redirects, etc).

• Ensure your new sites navigation is solid. You usually do not want a link to every page. Generally speaking you want to keep under 100 links per page. If you offer too many links you may not be managing your site's PR and rankings can be negatively impacted.

Once the above steps are completed it can take a month for search engines to fully crawl your site and discover all of it's content. Your rankings should settle down thereafter. At that point your main focus is to earn at least some links to each new page on your site.