A website revamp can be an exciting yet scary venture for any business. The opportunity to get a visual redesign to appeal to more customers normally comes at the expense of online ranking.
Below are a couple of tips to retain or even improve your web ranking when launching your website.
Plan Ahead
Before working on the initial design, you must already know your goals and how your website can help with that. This can be attracting leads from females aged 18-24 or becoming the leader in Joomla! Web Development.
Once these are established, keywords will play a factor. For example, “web development” will attract a very large market. This may or may not necessarily include your targeted Joomla! Web Development. Using a more detailed keyword such as “Joomla! Web development” will target a smaller market but you can be assured that this is the market you are looking for.
Design
Designers are there for a reason – to design. But not all graphics should be an image or flash. Google should know that your content is about. If the content is all images, Google won’t be able to read it.
Stylizing the text in an image is a good way to make them readable by Google. Instead of making menu items pure images, use CSS. This will greatly help Google determine the content of your site.
Launch Preparations
Make sure all alt tags, meta tags, page titles and others are in sync with the specified keywords. This is usually done by an SEO expert after the website has been built and ready for launch. This step is quite important and can make a measurable difference in web rankings.
Setting up 301 redirects can either lose or keep your rankings. This passes the “link rankings” from the old pages to the new website pages. Examine the old sitemap alongside the new one. This step requires someone who is experience in setting up 301 redirects.
The next stage would be creating an HTML sitemap that will allow Google’s bots to find and crawl through. This can also be achieved via creating an XML sitemap and sending it directly to Google via webmaster tools. This should be done after the website is launched though.
Actual Launch
Test and monitor your website. When launched, go through the new website and recheck if all the coding is correct. Visit the pages and confirm if the redirect work. Go through the logs and check any errors.
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