Website redesign - how do I avoid screwing up my site SEO?

[RyanD.]

We are preparing to launch a newly designed (and much improved) website in the next few months. I want to be very careful to ensure we do not mess up any rankings (and hopefully actually improve rankings) when switching over the site.

I'm particularly concerned about one key phrase that our homepage currently ranks on. After the redesign it would be more appropriate for our of our subpages to rank for that term, but I'd rather have our homepage rank (less relevant for this keyword than the subpage) then nothing at all.

I know about 301 redirects, and we are planning on creating a few comprehensive diagrams to ensure we redirect old pages to the correct new pages. Beyond that, what can I do to preserve our rankings?

Thanks!

-Ryan

[EGOL]

Great to hear that you are improving your design.  Its a great time to improve your SEO too!

You want to be sure that you preserve all of your on-page optimization elements such as <title>   <h>   and other markup.  You also want to preserve internal linkage, anchor text and image optimization.</p> <p>Navigation structure can be a place where you might be able to make some linkjuice and usability gains by placing links to important pages in your persistent navigation, incorporating navigation hierarchy such as breadcrumbs, and incorporating relevant links in your paragraph text if you don't have these features at present.</p> <p>For such an important project it might be worthwhile to hire a person who really understands how linkjuice and flows through a site to help you</p> <p>Finally you mention 301 redirects on old pages to new pages.   This sounds like you are going to change a lot of URLs.  Is that necessary?  Preserving the old URLs can be more efficient.</p></title>

[TaitLarson]

EGOL is hinting at something I"ll say more explicitly; why don't you split your site design into two phases?

• Phase 1: Optimize / Update the UI of your site.  Keep the markup that's relevant to your SEO efforts the same or improve it.
• Phase 2: Change the URLs of the pages on your site.

Once the dust settles from Phase 1 and you've seen how Google has responded to you updates, consider whether or not you really want to do Phase 2.

All that said, I have implemented both Phase 1 and Phase 2 at the same time before. I was careful to add lots of 301 redirect rules to my .htaccess files using mod_rewrite.  I did not experience any kind of rankings penalty from Google.

[AlanBleiweiss]

What works for my clients when I help them transition is to do all that's been suggested so far (even considering splitting out the work into phases if at all possible).  But also, it's doing a press release right away, getting social buzz about the new site, and working on adding / building up the content around the core phrases, then link to that new content from the home page.

Then focus on link building efforts to reinforce the new URLs.  And see if you can get any existing link sources to change the URLs in those to the new version links - sending much stronger signals than just 301 redirected links.

If you do the work properly, you should eventually have both the home page and the inner pages show up for your most important phrases.