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February 12, 2010

Re-designing Your Website for Search Engine Optimization: Pleasing Your Visitors and Google Simultaneously

Most webmasters have gone through the process of re-designing their website to please the search engines. Just when you think you have it all figured out, you realize you made a crucial mistake and you have to go back to the drawing board. The problem is, you want your website to look as good as possible, but you also want it to be liked by all of the search engines, especially Google. This can be a daunting task, because it is easy to lose your search engine ranking by re-designing your site, even if the new version of your site appears to be more optimized for search engines.

Why Does My Site Lose Ranking When I Re-design?

The reason why this happens is because your search engine ranking is based on the current architecture of your website. When the architecture changes (especially when it involves renaming URL's and moving links) then the ranking of your site also changes, due to unavailable pages and lost “link juice.” Google is basically hindering your freedom of creativity by enforcing rules that prevent you from re-designing your website in the most innovative way possible. For example, Flash and Java content is not indexed effectively by search engine crawlers, so instead of having a media-rich site, you have to fill your site with text initially to allow the crawler to do it's job. Of course a media-oriented website would be more entertaining to your visitors, but it does not please the search engines. So the question is:

How do you balance search engine and visitor satisfaction?

R.R.R.R. - Retain your Rank with Redirects when Re-designing

To completely re-design your website without losing any search engine ranking, you'll need to use URL rewrites and 301 redirects to match your old web pages to the new counterparts. Of course, accomplishing this task requires server power if you are going to do it with many pages.  Simply put, when you setup a redirect, the old URL brings the visitor to the new page. This prevents broken links, which ultimately result in poor search engine ranking.  The main problem with redirects is that each redirect consumes server resources. This does not present a problem with small to moderately sized websites, however a huge website would need extra server power to accomplish this.

S.S.S.S.  - Stop Starting from Scratch for SEO

Of course the above redirecting solution would work if you had a powerful dedicated server, or if you had a small website, but what if you have a large website and you don't have infinite server power or extensive knowledge in redirects? Well, the other option you have is to make small changes in increments. Making huge changes overnight is a good way to lose search engine ranking, even if the changes you are making are supposed to benefit your website's search engine optimization. Any huge structural change to your website is going to affect the way search engines index your site. Only time will tell if the drop in search engine rankings are temporary, but why take the risk of losing your rank at all? Instead of intentionally risking your site's ranking, it is advisable to change one page at a time and to do so with as little media content as possible in the beginning.

Following the two above tips will ensure you are re-designing your website with search engines in mind.

Tags: SEO,  search engine ranking,  search engine optimization,  re-designing website,  media-oriented website,  link juice,  Google,  301 redirects,  URL rewrites