Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview - Tackling the Basics
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Okay, you now have a feeling for the site, the site owner's field and its competitive landscape, and the goals for the redesign. Now what? Well, if it's an old site, it may not have kept up with the most current trends in the field. You need to know what keywords searchers are using to find whatever your client offers.
I won't go into how to do keyword research, since there are plenty of articles here on SEO Chat that explain that topic in detail. Depending on the field, however, you might find that you need to be careful with your tools. Richard Hearne discovered that some keyword research tools may deliver skewed results for certain phrases - because "a very large number of the reported searches are going to be executed for the purpose of collecting keyword data." The SEO/SEM field is notorious for this, with many searchers not interested in hiring services so much as finding out what their competitors are up to.
Obviously, once you have the appropriate keywords, you need to use them in all the right places. That means title tags and site text; meta descriptions are more controversial in the sense that many insist the search engines don't look at those anymore. Still, there are places where you should include descriptions if they aren't already there, such as alt tags for images on the site. Avoid keyword stuffing; remember, those tags will be used in ways other than SEO. They get read by site reading software used by the blind, for example. Keep it short and sweet, and use any keywords sensibly.
When you're changing files and pages and such, make sure you do all the redirects correctly. This would be a good time to check your backlinks, too, and find out who is linking deep into your site. You'll want to consider building a custom 404 page as well, just in case anyone does get lost. If your folder structure is changing - and chances are it is - you'll also want to update your robots.txt file. You don't want your visitors to get lost; you surely don't want Google to get lost either!
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