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04.19.10 SEOing Your Site During A Re-Launch  By Jacob StoopsThis article comes on the heels of a few website redesigns and relaunches that the SEO team and I have had to work through over here at People To My Site. People (namely me) and companies are always redesigning their websites, and while some really do it right there is always the potential for it to get really screwed up from an SEO perspective - which happens more than I care to admit. Don't get me wrong, when you're doing a redesign think users and aesthetics first and foremost. A pretty design makes people go "Ooooh" and "Ahhhh". But if you forget to think of SEO, then nobody finds your website and it doesn't matter. The only twisted reference that I can come up with is, it would be kind of like if Jessica Alba had no backbone or skeleton. Sure, it may be really pretty to look at, but if there's no framework to hold it up it's just a big glob of nothing! So after that "stark" reference, here's some SEO things you need to consider when redesigning and relaunching your website. Do these things, and you should have a pretty smooth and successful website relaunch. #1. Your SEO Team & Design Team Need to Talk This is something that absolutely needs to happen, and rarely does until right before the website is supposed to launch. The plain and simple truth is that designers tend to think like designers, and tend to think about what looks good before they ever consider (if they do at all) what is best from an SEO perspective. Many people assume that designers and SEO's can't or shouldn't work together, and I'm here to say that assumption is FALSE. I'm the first to admit, I think like a designer first and an SEO second. So whoever is managing the project needs get the SEO team and Design team together early, so that the designers don't "write checks that that the SEO team can't cash" so to speak. Do this, and you'll head off most SEO issues at the pass, while still giving the designers some freedom and flexibility to do what they do - only with SEO in mind as they do it. #2. Don't Go Backwards with Your Coding In 1995, most websites were coded using tables, inline styling, etc. In 2010, most designers tend to use Div's and CSS - it's just cleaner. Now Google will say the there's nothing wrong with tables, however Google also likes pages that load fast. This is not to say that you can't or shouldn't use tables as your primary layout mechanism, but most of the table-based websites that I see have a ton of code bloat, inline styling, etc. These are all things that tend to slow down page-load speed. #3. Get As Much SEO Done As Possible Prior To Launch I've seen this time and time again. People/companies will have a hard launch date for a website, and will stick to it no matter if the website has the SEO implemented or not. What's better, is they'll wonder why the SEO isn't working as fast as they'd like later on? I've seen this many times. If you want your website to get as much bang-for-the-buck as it can right out of the box, then it's best to get as much optimization work done as you can out of the shoot. If you have to push back the launch date a few days, then so be it. Your results will come much faster if your not putting the optimization together piece-meal after the damn thing has launched. #4. 301-Redirects of Old URL's Continue reading this article.
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