If you just made significant changes to your website design, or are thinking about giving your website a face lift/some major on-site SEO optimizations, you are probably wondering what kind of impact those changes will have on your search engine rankings.
Several of my SEO clients have seen some serious fluctuation after making major changes to the copy or structure of their website, and come to me asking, “Those changes are supposed to help my rankings – but I just dropped out of site! What’s going on?”
Watching search engine rankings decline after paying a bundle on SEO and web design changes can be painful, and you will likely see a temporary decrease in site traffic, but if you can stomach the temporary set-back, you will be better off for it in the long run.
Changing your website may temporarily hurt your rankings, but it will come out on top after some fluctuation.
If you see some fluctuation, don’t let it surprise you. Search engines are just re-evaluating the new content on your site – it has changed a lot since the last time they visited your site, and have to make sure that your site is still relevant to those keywords.
You’ll see some fluctuation – your website rankings will probably drop at first, then shoot up and down for a few weeks like a Californian seismograph, but in my experience, you can count on it coming out on top in the end – with much higher rankings than the website had before.
The good news: it won’t hurt for long. It will usually take between 30 and 60 days to see the improvement you are looking for, but think of what you’ve gained:
- You now have a SE-Optimized website, so you are going to see more traffic in the future for keywords on all of your pages.
- New content will be ready for search engines
- Your website is more user friendly and useful for your visitors
- The optimized content on your website will bring relevant traffic for a very long time – SEO has to be part of your long-term marketing strategy
Tips for redesigning your website without losing SEO value:
- Use 301 Permanent Redirects to redirect users who may be visiting the former pages on your site via bookmark links, old marketing material, or various links around the web. Redirect them to their new equivalents or to relevant pages. Using a 301 Permanent Redirect will preserve the SEO value of the former web pages, and channel them to the proper destination. Links and search engine rankings that pointed to old pages on your site will still be relevant, and the new pages will rank for the same keywords as the previous page did.
- Keep the content that worked for you. And throw out the rest. Keeping the content that your visitors (and search engines) liked will keep them coming, and will reduce the negative fluctuation that will follow the redesign.
- Take advantage of the redesign to do everything right. Make sure your title and meta tags are unique, look over your navigation structure, make sure you are using text links, and proper semantic XHTML structure to aid search engines in determining the structure and heirarchy of your website.
Tags: rankings, SEO, Web Design
