Redesign with SEO in mind

A site redesign or switch to a new platform is kind of like a rebirth — it's one of the most exciting and nerve-wracking times for the entire Internet marketing team. With everyone caught up in the branding, design, usability and technology, the impact on search engine optimization can sometimes be forgotten until the last minute.

Whether the task at hand is redesigning or replatforming, start by doing some SEO reconnaissance. Ask the vendor to provide several of their clients' sites, in particular sites that are structured like your planned site or that contain similar features.

Press releases are another good source of client lists, as are on-site testimonials. You can get an idea of the challenges that might lie ahead by performing a 60-second Website audit, identifying a snapshot of the challenges that each of the sites serviced by a vendor have in common.

It can be hard to determine what the natural search impact will be until working code hits a development server. But remembering the following five SEO development mantras and repeating them often will keep the team focused on the most critical elements to plan for success.

Links must be crawlable with JavaScript, CSS and cookies disabled.

Links provide the ability to crawl a site, passing link popularity and keyword signals deeper into the site. If a site's links are not crawlable to search spiders, that site will be critically limited in the search terms for which it can rank and drive traffic and sales.

While their ability to crawl more complex sites is getting better, search engines do not traditionally crawl with JavaScript and CSS enabled, and they don't accept cookies. Whiz-bang interactive sites designed in AJAX and Flash are likely to be only minimally crawlable, and only if specific optimization techniques are used.

Even less-complex elements such as expandable navigation and rollovers can be coded in different ways to be more or less crawlable. Do your company a favor and plan to include a “graceful degradation” or progressive enhancement version of elements on the site that need to be both fantastically interactive and SEO friendly.

Plain text must be crawlable on the page with JavaScript and CSS disabled.

Similar to the above linking issue, the unique text on page shouldn't be locked inside images and Flash, or nonexistent without JavaScript and CSS enabled. The important aspect here is “the unique content.” If the only crawlable plain text on the page is the navigational header and footer, then every page will send a very similar keyword signal.

Crawlable anchor text is important, yes, but this second mantra focuses on the unique body content. As with links, uncrawlable content can be exposed using a number of optimization techniques.

Every page must send a unique keyword signal.

Just as every page needs crawlable plain text on the page, every page must send its own unique keyword signal. Every page has a unique reason to exist, or else it would be part of another page.

The platform must have the ability to expose these unique keyword signals on every page in a unique title tag, HTML headings and other optimizable fields. Every template needs to be designed to contain at least an H1 heading and one sentence of body copy.

The fields in each template should be able to be optimized automatically with a customizable formula that places specified text elements from the database in a specified order in the title tag, HTML headings and meta data. But the platform also needs to enable manual optimization of those fields so that the critical pages can be hand-optimized.

One URL for one page of content.

Each unique page of content needs one single URL. This can be trickier than it sounds.

Some platforms publish content in multiple locations with different URLs. Some analytics programs append tracking parameters. Some servers aren't canonicalized to a single protocol, TLD, domain, subdomain, directory or file extension.

For example, consider the following 10 URLs that would theoretically all load the same page of content:

• http://www.domain.com/pub/article1.html
• http://www.domain.com/pub/feature/article1.html
• http://www.domain.com/pub/article1.html?tracking=left_nav
• http://www.domain.com/pub/article1.html
• https://www.domain.com/pub/article1.html
• http://www.domain.biz/pub/article1.html
• http://www.domain-online.com/pub/article1.html
• http://seo-keyword.domain.com/pub/article1.html
• http://www.domain.com/publication/article1.html
• http://www.domain.com/pub/article1.aspx

I have seen every one of these duplication examples — and more — in play on client sites. Often, a site will suffer from several duplication sources, which then multiply each other to create hundreds or thousands of URLs for the same page of content. The best way to stop content duplication is to ensure that it never starts, at the platform and server level.

We're going to 301 that, right?

This is a good mantra to pull out every time URL changes are discussed, whether it's one by one or across the whole site, ensuring that every legacy URL has been considered as part of a 301 redirect plan. More on this below.

Test development sites for SEO prelaunch

As the time draws near to launch the redesign, the SEO professional should be a key part of the testing corps. Of course, you'll want to go through the usual slew of testing rituals that your company has outlined before a major launch. But on the SEO front, a couple more checks are required.

Use a tool such as Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar add-on for Firefox to disable JavaScript, cookies and CSS. Can you still navigate the site? Or do links disappear/unlink? Try disabling images.

Next Page: Create 301 maps to pass SEO strength to the new site