Website redesign is always going to necessary in a world of changing consumer needs and competitor strategies. There can be many reasons to redesign your website, such as catching up with the Web 2.0 buzz, to improve the accessibility and functionality of your site or it may just need a more modern and fresh appearance.
How far to go with the redesign is usually the next aspect a business will look at. You can either strip the website back to bare bones and fix it up as you rebuild it or scrap the whole thing and start from scratch. The level of redesign that is required will always depend on how well the original site was designed.
Whether you are redesigning your website from scratch or just patching it up, it is critical to think from an SEO perspective as well as a design perspective because if you are not driving enough organic traffic to your site then nothing else is going to matter.
While redesigning your site here are some proven tips for you to consider:
Keywords
It is important to remember that a search engines job is to crawl your website looking for keywords that will match a user’s search query. Keywords in the text of your website including your homepage that read naturally are great for your search engine rank position’s (SERPS). Just be careful not to stuff the page with keywords as keyword stuffing will lower your rank. As long as the keywords read naturally in your content you will be fine.
Extra Content
Once the main pages of your website are designed and the copy has been written for them you need to start thinking about what extra content you can create for the site and where you can put links to that content. Part of a successful link building strategy in SEO is creating well written and interesting content that people will want to naturally link to.
Outbound Links
Outbound links are looked at the same way inbound links are from an SEO perspective so what you want to do is have a few outbound links to highly relevant and trustworthy sites. Search engines will look at those links and they do not want to see lots of outbound links posting to irrelevant, untrustworthy websites.
H1 Headers
It is very important that each page has a H1 Header which is the title of the page. The H1 tag (<h1>Page Title<h1>) tells the search engines that this header is the most important on the page, therefore it is important to include relevant and important keywords in your titles. Bolding your title is not enough as it is looked at as the same as normal normal text which does not have as much value.
Navigation/Site Structure
It is always important to design a site that is easy for the search engines to tell which are the most important pages on your website. By structuring your site correctly you will be telling the search engines to rank those pages first as they are the most relevant to your keywords. The homepage is always the most important page obviously but what is your next most important page? It you have an ecommerce site it will be your shops main categories. So the url to those mail categories should always only be one subfolder away from the homepage for e.g if your website address is http://www.bondcleansrus.com.au/end-of-lease-cleaning-sydney then your next important page should only have one “/” in the url ie http://www.bondcleansrus.com.au/end-of-lease-cleaning-melbourne.
Knowledgeable About SEO
When hiring someone to redesign or design your website, get someone who is knowledgeable about SEO. Hiring a web designer that knows nothing about SEO can cost you extra money in the long run because it means going back and correcting things. It also can cost you money by not having your site ranked higher in the search engines as it should have been from the onset. Hiring someone with SEO knowledge is one of the most beneficial things you can do while building your website to make sure that you are doing all of the things correctly to have your website crawled and indexed by the search engines.