SEO Tactics: Avoiding Website Redesign Mistakes

2. Marketing nowadays has become so competitive as there are too many expectations from users and potential clients because of technology. Part of that change is the growing trend in website re-designing. And it’s vital that we keep up with the fast-paced changes. Quick recall! Last month, I discussed the 7 Techniques For Building Site Reputation, and mentioned from that article how crucial it is to monitor and improve your website which will also develop your SEO strategy and in the process, build your site’s reputation and performance.

3. How to avoid website redesigning mistakes Website redesigning is an essential part of marketing. And while it has a significance, it is also an avenue that can present certain risks from an SEO perspective. Some things can go wrong in the process of designing a web page, and that’s where issues may potentially cause search engines to no longer view that website, and at some point, it can also result to penalties. It’s best to know the potential risks to avoid making that kind of mistake, so we’ll take a deeper look into some common website redesigning scenarios that can potentially destroy SEO. The following:

4. Crawlable or indexable environments under development stage – content creators or web designers would often set up a domain strictly for development, or merely create a subfolder under their field, while some are precautious and prefers to hide their development environment for their privacy. Search engines automatically follow links and index contents they find, even if asked not to. They can create or index another version of the website which will potentially cause issues with both content and link. The best way to avoid that is to use a URL that has never been used for a live website before as this ensures that no connections are pointing to it already. Then disallow bots using robots.txt and make sure to set up an empty index page so that other folders are not visible.

5. Randomly change image names on well-ranking pages – this usually happens when a web designer doesn’t understand the specifics of SEO and decide to redesign a page that already ranks well. And as a part of the redesigning process, they will replace old images with new ones, larger models. However, because they lack experience, they tend to use unintelligible image names which results in zero SEO value. As an effect, this removes a crucial part that search engines use to determine where that specific web page should rank.

6. Changing page URLs or deleting them without properly redirecting them – during the process of redesigning, some pages may be deemed unnecessary. Inexperienced web designers will delete them. Other pages will be moved or renamed which results to a change with the URL itself. And then they often leave it like its, considering the work finished. It’s possible that these pages may already be returning good results and already ranks well. If it also happens that these pages already have inbound links pointing to them, the SEO value gets lost which can cause a loss in ranking. This issue can go worse, which is landing to a 404 error page. Aside from zero value, this creates a negative customer experience. This part is where the importance of 301 redirecting comes in handy. Whether moving or deleting a page, the best way is to redirect them because it signals the search engine that the old page has been removed and permanently moved to a new location.

7. Not checking for crawl errors after migration between live and development environments – it doesn’t matter which method you use, there is always a possibility to run into errors. We often go back to and fro between the new one and the development environment after testing. But if you get too complacent and forget to review the links to external sources after the new website has migrated, you may never know if the content in these pages may still point to the old one within the developmental stage. Fortunately, there are tools specially created for that purpose, such as Screaming Frog, or a cloud-based like tool such as SEMrush.

8. Not performing a complete function check within the website – after completing a website migration, it’s crucial that aside from running a quick review of pages to make sure that it looks OK, it’s essential to make sure as well that the page functions are working correctly including the following: Google Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools Verification Contact Forms Search Capability E-commerce functionality Interactive Tools Multimedia players Analytics Dynamic Ads Tracking pixels

9. Failure to reconfigure WordPress and plugins after migrating to the new live server – As we discussed earlier index and crawled pages, this is a grave mistake that’s often devastating. It’s critical to check immediately the configuration of WordPress as well as any other plugins that can affect search engines’ response to your website. Namely, the plugins are for: Google Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools Verification Contact Forms Search Capability E-commerce functionality Interactive Tools Multimedia players Analytics Dynamic Ads Tracking pixels

10. Conclusion But of course, at the end of the day, it’s highly significant not to neglect to pay close attention to all the details. These mistakes are not difficult to avoid. We need to be aware of them. It’s like an unspoken rule already, and there should be enough room to make sure everything has been reviewed carefully before finalising.

11. Source: https://anythingseo.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/seo-tactics- avoiding-website-redesign-mistakes/