Mistakes made during website redesigns can cause the site to disappear from search results and shut down traffic. For example, extra care should be taken if the design will include Flash, frames, parallax scrolling, scripted menus, or dynamic content. SEO best practices complement usability and clean design best practices. In general, a website should be well-organized and fully crawlable by search engines, the content on each page should be unique, and the pages should load quickly. Doing a thorough site audit is a useful exercise that can reveal problems with a website’s domain name, server settings, code, content organization and themes, navigation, and search engine crawlability. It may not always be possible, organizationally or technically, to ensure all of these tactics are followed. However, following as many as possible will yield tangible benefits. If redesigning a website using the same domain name:

• watch out for page URLs that will be changing and create 301 or permanent redirects for each of those
• if 301 redirects were created, be sure to adjust internal links to point to the new page URLs, and adjust any external links that you can adjust (because these are on other websites, your control over them may be limited)
• try not to delete pages unless it’s necessary; search engines will take note of the missing pages and broken external links
• avoid taking down the site while it’s being worked on – existing pages have authority and traffic, and taking down the site will remove them from search engine indexes

If redesigning or creating a new website:

• if using a development environment to create a new website, do not allow it to be indexed by search engines until it is ready to be launched
• avoid using ‘gateway’ home pages which force readers to select one of two directions; this stops crawlers and ruins the page’s search visibility
• register your domain name for as many years as possible; make sure you own and control your domain, because its stability is important to your search visibility
• it is no longer useful to have a domain name with specific keywords like “defenselawyerincolumbus.com” (these are called exact match domains); choose a domain name that works best with your brand
• if buying a domain that has been used by someone else, check it for authority problems before building on it
• make sure you have “www resolve” set correctly (this usually requires a 301 redirect from the non-www version of the site to the www version)
• in general, when setting up the domain and configuring server settings, make sure it is not possible for the same page of content to show on more than one page URL (we go into more detail on the site audit)
• involve an SEO during the wireframes review – they will often ask questions that reveal potential issues before spending the money to build out the site
• new web sites usually have empty or generic page titles and meta descriptions – these should be filled in with unique, page specific info as soon as possible following the rules for these tags
• if you have more than one domain name, don’t place the same content on both; make decisions that allow for unique content on every page
• if adding links to other websites, choose them with care as too many links can weaken your own domain authority; it is fine to link to your preferred vendors that you recommend, but avoid getting involved in link wheels where you don’t know the sites you are linking to
• avoid publishing pages made up of long lists of links, and never hide or camouflage links
• never use an image to convey important information without also putting that info in text format and use alt text on the image
• limit the use of Flash and avoid the use of Frames as these are not crawlable and indexable by search engines (plus iOS devices can’t see Flash)
• if using parallax scrolling for the design, keep pages limited to one topic each; it is possible for an entire site to be built on one page because of the technology’s versatile navigation, but search engines see a bunch of content all on the same page, limiting that page’s relevance
• if creating dynamic content using AJAX, use a search friendly deployment
• resize images to the size at which they will be used and keep the total size (in kb or mb) of the page lean for faster load times and better crawling by search engines; use pagespeed and load time checkers to fine tune
• test navigation to ensure it is visible to search engine crawls – turn off images, javascript and css
• content organization should be planned with care and each page should only cover one topic
• each page of content should have a minimum of 2 paragraphs of text readable by search engines
• before finalizing content organization decisions, do keyword research to understand how people are searching for what you offer
• use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools as early as possible, preferably starting to analyze traffic before the redesign, to inform your content decisions
• other types of content – video, podcast, PDF, image – are valuable assets, but label them well so that search engines can index them
• use microformats (schema.org) to label commonly used information like name, address, etc. – this allows the info to show up in search results
• make use of H1 tags on main headlines to emphasize the page topic to search engines
• if attracting customers to a store location is important, make sure your company name, address and local phone are in text format on the contact us page
• if using tracking phone numbers, have them placed as images dynamically based on the source of the traffic to preserve NAP consistency, and put the local phone in text format
• if your business has several locations, create a page for each so they have strong local search presence