A big thanks to our Pubcon 2014 sponsor, LinkResearchTools, your off-page SEO toolkit. Link Detox: Recover – Protect – Build.
At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk withJoe Hall of JoeHall.me about technical SEO and the kinds of things to be mindful of when redesigning a website.
When redesigning a website, what can you do to ensure that your rankings don’t drop as a result of it? What technical elements should be in place on the new site?
These are some of the questions I get his unique insight on in the video below:
Site Redesign Necessities and Technical SEO: An Interview with Joe Hall
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- The main problem Joe keeps seeing with site redesigns is that people don’t spend enough time planning the site structure beforehand, and considering how that site structure is going to impact everything else on the site.
- When redesigning a site, Joe recommends having a thorough understanding of how the organization of a site can impact its performance in the search results.
- Grouping content into categories with a proper URL structure is one of the ways content can be organized for better search performance.
- Before doing anything else, narrow down the key topics of your site and what you want it to rank for. This will guide how you group content into categories and how you arrange the URL structure.
- Be careful with changing URLs. When you change URLs you most definitely have to have a redirection strategy in place because you don’t want to have a bunch of broken links pointing to your site because the old URLs are no longer valid.
- Joe also recommends staying away from JavaScript when redesigning a site. Even though Google is getting better at crawling JavaScript, it’s getting to a point where people are overdoing it. If you must use JavaScript, keep it as minimal as you can.
[“source-searchenginejournal”]
