6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

Guest Post: By Jill Whalen

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

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Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

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• Advertising, Opt-in Leads, Email Marketing service helps small businesses market their products more effectively. We provide everything you need, http://www.madviral.com Phone: 256-778-8350 (9am-5pm CST M-F) MadViral Enterprises, LLC 171 Early Rd. Hartselle, Al. 35640

6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

Long Tail Queries and Long Tail Keywords

Guest Post:  by Neville Silverman

Long Tail Queries and Long Tail Keywords

The number of words used in search queries has increased over the years, whilst the shorter search queries have decreased. This is the result of the ever-growing sophistication of people doing searches. The searchers attempt to minimise the number of Websites visited, before they find what they want.

The competition amongst Websites for visitors who do searches with few words is ferocious, and with the growth of Websites on the Internet, getting fiercer by the day.

Short phrase queries, although high in number, make up only 20% of potential visitors. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will be most effective when also attempting to attract the remaining 80% where the traffic per query phrase is low – the Long Tail.

Long Tail SEO involves attracting visitors using the less popular Keywords. To attract the Long Tail Queries, the Website must be optimised for Long Tail Keywords – that is Keyword Phrases that are more specific. Long Tail Keyword Phrases can lead to a higher conversion rate, since these visitors are more likely to find exactly what they want. And it is much easier than competing against the top ranking Websites using short Keyword Phrases.

Those Websites that are not optimised with Long Tail Keywords could find the number of visitors and the conversion rate steadily declining.

Long Tail SEO Tips

All the techniques used for the organic Search Engine Optimisation apply. In addition:

> When choosing Long Tail Keyword Phrases, there is no point in doing what everybody else is doing. Try to rank for an ever increasing variety of terms, not just the most competitive ones.

> Research needs to be carried out on Keyword Phrases containing 5 or 6 words, instead of just a few high traffic Keywords.

> The descriptive, keyword rich Long Tail Phrases should be used in Navigation, Titles, Headings, Meta Description and Links.

> In order to cover more Keyword Phrase possibilities, you will need to create enough content to contain most of the less popular search phrases.

> Collect all the articles, advertising blurb, etc related to your Website and see if you can create new topics of interest.

> Combine 3 or 4 Keywords (or adjectives) that have a low search count, and create a long tail Keyword Phrase.

> Creating a page for every long-tail Keyword Phrase is hardly practical, so add one or more words to the usual Keyword Phrases. You may achieve good rankings for both the original Keyword Phrase and the Long Tail Phrase.

> Use Google Sets to find related Keywords.

Long Tail SEO will involve extra effort in researching appropriate phrases and writing additional content, but the results will be rewarding.

Ranking Above The Fold

“Above the Fold” refers to the top portion of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that is visible prior to scrolling.

The majority of searchers will click on the first entry “Above the Fold” that they come across in the SERP. That is why Bounce Rates are high, and why getting a high ranking is so important. And if the result is not satisfactory, the searchers will add yet another term and search again, making an even longer Long Tail query.

With Long Tail SEO and less competition, searchers are more likely to find your Website “Above the Fold”, more likely to visit your Website. And more likely to be content with what they find.

Serendipity

Serendipity is the good luck in making an accidental but providential discovery. Scientific serendipity involves the chance discovery, but which is the outcome of systematic research.

The scientific serendipity techniques can be applied to SEO. By creating many pages of different, but related aspects, there is a greater chance of being accidentally found by a Website searcher.

An example will make this clear. I was asked to create and optimise a Website for a mathematics coach – see Smith Mathematics Coaching. I told him that his Website needed many different pages of content, related to mathematics coaching, in order to increase the chances of being found by the Search Engines. One of the documents that he supplied was a list of the schools that his students came from. The name of the school included the suburb. It turned out that many parents, when they searched for a mathematics coach, included their suburb in the search phrase. And serendipitously, many visitors landed on the Webpage page that contained the listing of the schools.

n hindsight, one can see the value of including the suburb, but this fortunate occurrence was unlikely to have been predicted. It also could not have been ascertained from any Keyword research, as volumes were too low.

There are many benefits to creating new pages with chance phrases, whilst sticking to the topic. These pages can increase visitor numbers significantly, reduce the bounce rate, and increase the conversion rate from visitor to customer.

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Neville Silverman is a Microsoft software developer, based in Sydney Australia, and has been involved in Visual Basic programming, Microsoft Access programming and Website design for many years. As an I.T. Manager, his department was regarded as a centre of excellence. He reduced the expenses of his department to .9% of income, where the industry average was 2.5%.  Programming Website: http://nev.romtech.com.au/ SEO Website: http://www.nevsseo.com/ Email: nev@romtech.com.au

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• Advertising, Opt-in Leads, Email Marketing service helps small businesses market their products more effectively. We provide everything you need, http://www.madviral.com Phone: 256-778-8350 (9am-5pm CST M-F) MadViral Enterprises, LLC 171 Early Rd. Hartselle, Al. 35640

Long Tail Queries and Long Tail Keywords