Hi, I have a very successful site in a very very competitive industry that i want to redesign. (i will not disclose the url sorry - client site). It ranks high on most search phrases but we have all decided that it needs a face life to increase sales. My big concern is that if i mess with the site i will drop in serps? I want to use css, approved html code (w3 compliant), cleaner graphics etc ... Any tips ? anything new in web development i should be thinking of using? Im looking a dropping the page size down by using css Better quality content faster loading. suggestions please. Thanks inadvance
You main concerns will be with the site structure/page naming conventions and new (if any) content on the site... The code compliance and other issues are not really SEO considerations. Certainly more external scripts is good, but w3C has little to do with things
meaning if the site struxture or page names chage ( somepage.html to anotherpage.html ) Are you redeveloping the site? Or merely changing an exsiting template?
you keep it mind that if you are putting name of your page then try to put the same name what it was in your old site. even try to put the same name of your images, will be helpfull to maintain your ranking.
Really ? keep the same image names? any other tips? I was going to ask about the page naming if the following was a good idea? If my old site has a page like red-bikes.html is it better to keep the same page name or use 301 redirects and set up a sub domain like htt ://red-bikes.site.com ??? Was thinking about trying to change some page names to gain the small extra seo benefit of a opterimised page name rather then any old page name.
go CSS Make correct use of page name, page title, page description, H1, H2 Don't know if you use Adsense or other way to monetize de site. Make sude the new site structure feets the better banner sizes. Pay attention to links internally on your site, where they appear on the page. As you don't show your site, can suggest any more stuff.
thanks for the advice but im more concerened if i change the design the spiders will look at the site and make me start all over again with my seo? even google sand box?
I think having older pages outweighs the effect of better page names. So I would avoid changing names of pages, where you can. Also any deeplinks into your site will still work if you don't change page-names. External CSS is a good idea: gives better quality code for google to go through.
No chance of the sandbox if the domain name stays the same. But the reason for not changing file-names is also that each new page will have to be recrawled by google before it gets indexed. An old page that's revamped will still have its old rank, even if google doesn't know what the new content is.
Image names won’t make a difference. For the page names (if they are changing) you will need to re0direct te old pages to the new ones. What type of server environment are U on? Unix/Linux or Windows? While SEs CAN use page segmentation (page structure) to analyze a page, it would not affect this scenario.
I think keeping the image names same is a bit paranoid unless you get a lots of clicks from google image search etc. It's ok to change page names IF you will do 301 redirect from the old pages to new ones. I know too little of subdomain issue to comment about it, although I do use subdomains for different sections on my site and it seems that some of the sections get much more search traffic and rank much better than others.
I have did this on several occasions and the worst result I have seen is no change in the SERPS. In other words the effect has been almost always positive. Go CSS Retain existing Domain Name Retain existing Page Names Don't go crazy with changes to description and title Meta If you do this you will be OK and you may even see an improvement in the SERPs. It will not harm your ranking.
I've re-designed websites with no ill consequences. That's because most Google SEO is off-page anyways.