hi , i am planning to go for a redesign of one of my old site in .htm extension , please suggest me what care i should take to avoid any seo problem , the site is old and has a good page rank with many inner pagerank , so please guide me if anyone has any good experience in redesign of a old aged pr site and what were the result after the redesign. thanks
Hi, Mainly you can expect after re-designing your website that your site hierarchy or structure might change, so you might need to resubmit your sitemap for that site to the search engines that have listed it prior and that are showing up a good rank in order to recognize the structure of the site again and reflect the changes. As this might take some time (unable to be measured by us humans) don;t feel discouraged if your site is not showing up the in same position on searches related to those keywords as this might change back again. You might need to consider, if you are changing the content of the pages, as you might want to update the meta keywords to reflect those changes as well. This is a good opportunity for you to re-evaluate the content text and keywords of your webpages, probably to rank the site even higher. Let/s say that you included a new product and obviously there is some text related to it in your individual webpage. Try to do a research of potential similar words that have the same meaning for other people, and include all those in your meta keywords tags at the <head> section of the document. That way your keywords will match more accurately the new content on your webpages, as you go, and will probably even rank your page higher than before. If you are adding some images, consider using the alt and title tags and include those descriptions as well in your keywords to match the body text and expect more relevancy to the keywords searched by users. If you are renewing just the layout, and not the content, you might expect not too many changes in the PR since robots only attempt to crawl text, and follow links.
whether you will face any impact in terms of ranking depends on what type of redesign you are doing. if you are changing file extension from asp to htm or htp to php for example, then you will have some ranking fluctuation. if you do major layout and/or content change, you will see ranking fluctuation as well. what you need to do or what to look for depends on whether you are just changing the layout or content or changing the file extensions as well. if just the content or layout, then al you need to do is to build a little more backlinks once your update is done. if you are changing the file extensions, then you will need to do a 301 redirect form old file to new file so that google known the new file and at the same time can realize that your old file move to the new one permanently.
you can permanent redirect all old pages to new developed pages. I did same year ago for a site use pure css/xhtml as well as proper use of on page SEO code
It may affect your ranking, after redesigning your site. You just need to double your time in linkbuilding. Also, make sure that your design is SEO friendly.
Thanks. Good perspective on the answer from SultanofSeo, as these are also factors that you might want to take under consideration. If you are considering moving your new website to another domain (which I don;t think will be good in this case, as you are getting a regular traffic through and just want to update the content, but this vary from user to user) for not losing visitors, you can always use many techniques for redirection to the new site after re-design is done such as the one proposed by SultanofSeo but it will depend on to which language you are migrating for creating your pages from now on. If you are going to use .php for your new website, I honestly recommend you to use .htaccess (if you need any help on this I can send you an example, as we work with this constantly. But on the net you can look for similar techniques related to 301 redirection depending on the language that you are using for implementing this solution), again if you are planning of course to move from your current domain only.
once again thanks to all for the help.. we are planning to change the design and some meta changes , the site is aged and has over 400 pages with a pr 4 and many inner pages have page rank , we are looking for a redesign as the bounce rate is too high as the navigation is not proper , its a 2003 site so it really needs a redesign to go ahead in terms of traffic and ranking . the current file extension is .htm and we will keep it the same so the content and the extension remains the same , but the design will change with the layout .i was planning to shift to a custom cms to make it easy to update and work it regularly as suggestion will really help . thx