Your website is often the face of your company, and there are oh so many reasons to give your website a facelift. Maybe it’s time to ramp up the functionality and enhance usability. Maybe the purpose of your site has changed, or its social media integration isn’t up to snuff. Maybe it still looks like this.
Whatever the reason, retaining - and even improving - your site’s SEO should be high up on your checklist.
Otherwise, your site will face heavy traffic loss, and all that work will be for naught. Sure, you may have poured significant time and money into your site’s overhaul, but if users can’t find the site, you’ve just remodeled a house with no address, on an island, an invisible island, in outer space.
To avoid traffic loss and conquer the search engines, here are five important considerations for an SEO-friendly redesign.
1. Ensure All Content Is Indexable
In order for a web page to be ranked in a search engine, it must be indexed by web crawlers. Think of these crawlers as an army of Pac-Men who scour webpages for little yellow dots of data. The crawlers then deliver that data to the search engine servers, where it’s catalogued and stored, much like a library.
But crawlers are picky eaters, and can only index certain types of data. In order for your content to be indexable, it must be formatted in a way that’s compatible with the crawlers’ particular dietary needs. Here are some guidelines:
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Any content you want indexed should be written in HTML.
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Any images you want indexed should contain alt tags.
- If your website has video or audio content, and you’d like that content to be indexed, include a written transcript on the website.
- Restricted pages, such as pages only accessible via a form or password, are not indexable, so avoid them when possible.
- Unless you’re dealing with sensitive information, avoid any instances of robots.txt. A robots.txt tells crawlers _not _to scan or process certain areas of a website.
If you’re having trouble deciding on what is and what is not indexable, or you want to verify your site’s indexability after redesign, use the following tools:
- Run Link Assistant’s Website Auditor to check for indexing and crawlability errors.
- Use Cached View to see a visual representation of a webpage’s indexable content.
- Take a mental break and play Pac-Man.
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