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
-
Magento technical SEO issues
Hi This is lots of questions and don't expect full answers but if anyone can help or put me in touch with some who can that would be great so here are 3 issues we have from some auditing our site Firstly on pages like https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc so any pages where there is a sortby the cananoical link doesn't seem to be working correctly. So for here it is https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc"/> but should be https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us"/> secondly with have a lot of duplicate title tags mainly caused from the blog and the above problem see-> http://prntscr.com/b2t9xe but regarding the blog we have an issue where 2 canonical appearing for example this page
Technical SEO | | tidybooks
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/ there are 2 canonical links appearing https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/"/> we want it to be this
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/"/> Thirdly
Our mobile usability issues have gone up a lot see- > http://prntscr.com/b2tado
I can see what the issue is that this folder https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/skin/frontend/tidybooks/default/images/ was being crawled by google and contains lots of 'index of' pages. I've disallowed directory in robots.txt as shown here -> http://prntscr.com/b2tbc5 is that correct? any help would be great Just to let you know we use magento v1.7 we use SEO suite ultimate extension and we use fishpigs wordpress extension thanks0 -
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
SEO Ultimate Plug in problems for SEO MOZ
Hi Newbee here! SEO ultimate seems to work ok for other url I have on this problem. http://www.pureescapism.co.uk and performing the on page grader for hair salon broadstairsI have canonicalizer on for the plug in and I have made it the rel=canonical targetIt tells me I haven't.Further down I don't get a tick also and am told : Remove all but a single canonical URL tag.Not aware I have more than one.I am also told : No More Than One Meta Description Element ( Cant see how I can do that either as I havent changed any code)Help please
Technical SEO | | Agentmorris0 -
Removing indexed website
I had a .in TLD version of my .com website floated for about 15 days, which was a duplicate copy of .com website. I did not wish to use the .in further for SEO duplication reasons and had let the .in domain expire on 26th April. But still now when I search from my website the .in version also shows up in results and even in google webmaster it shows the the website with maximum (190) number of links to my .com website. I am sure this is hurting the ranking of my .com website. How can the .in website be removed from googles indexing and search results. Given that is has expired also. thanks
Technical SEO | | geekwik0 -
With regard to tabbed content or accordions for text... would it be better to break these out into individual pages for SEO?
We often get asked by clients if they have a lot of content about a particular subject: would it be better to break that information out into smaller chunks as separate pages, OR would it be good to build a tabbed content container or accordion feature on one single page? Does anyone have any opinion on this in regards to SEO?
Technical SEO | | chansen0 -
Redesign existing websites / worried about urls / mapping
Hi Guys, While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as: example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about should I 301 the old url to the new url. In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this? (On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine), Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Yoast canonical SEO question
Hi I've installed Yoasts SEO plugin. I've just set it up as a campaign in SEOMOZ pro and i now see 14 notices about rel=canonical. I haven't added the rel=canonical myself and is in connection with the Yoast code on the site. Why does it do that and should i do something about it?
Technical SEO | | infocell0