I will be going through a site redesign soon. I was wondering what tips you would give for this to maintain current rankings and what advice you would offer on things to include in a site redesign to help improve SEO.
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.
If you require assistance with the redesign, please let me know. I will be happy to help we are experts in that.