During the last years, I worked with a lot of Website development company … and it’s always a pain for them to keep a good natural ranking after the redesign.
Why?
Because when a page or a document is moved within a website during its redesign, search engines must be notified of its new location. If this is not done, the page or document will lose its level of importance from an SEO standpoint.
My objective is to provide SEO recommendations for the purpose of minimizing the negative impact of the actual positioning of a website during his redesign.

1. HTML Titles
The title tag of a page is one of the most important elements in search engine optimization, along with the URLs. Because its purpose is to clearly define the theme of the page, search engines give it a significant weight in their algorithm. It is therefore essential to use in the HTML titles the keywords you want to rank on.
Example:
The home page on www.taxi.ca, like all the categories pages, currently uses the following HTML title:
TAXI
This HTML title means nothing to search engines, whereas the following one is explicit:
Marketing Agency – TAXI – Taxi.ca

2. URL
URLs are one of the most important search engine optimization components of a site. Search engines give a high importance to the keywords in the URLs. For this reason, a website that uses non-meaningful URLs is missing a big opportunity to rank better.
Example:
The About page of Taxi on Taxi.ca currently uses the following URL:
http://www.taxi.ca/index.cfm?pid=15199
This URL means nothing for search engines, whereas the following one is explicit:
http://www.taxi.ca/about-us/marketing-agency-of-the-year
Thus, the URLs should be descriptive, and use popular core keywords…
This strategy is generally called URL rewriting, and can be applied, whatever technology (ColdFusion in the case of Taxi) and CMS is used.

3. 301 redirections
Redesigning a site and changing its URLs is a big SEO challenge that should not be underestimated. When a page or a document is moved within a website, search engines must be notified of its new location. If this is not done, the page or document will lose its level of importance and thus will lose rankings in search engines. For lead generation sites or eCommerce sites, this may imply a dramatic decrease in search engines traffic.
SEO experts recommend using 301 redirects to notify search engines of the move or removal of a page. This redirection tells search engines that a page has been permanently moved, and that the positioning weight of the old page, should be reallocated to the new one.
Depending on the technology and server, the structure and implementation of those 301 redirections will vary.

4. Meta Tags
Meta tags were originally used to help search engines know what a page was about. Due to widespread abuse, Meta tags are now less and less important than they used to be. In fact, they do not directly influence rankings. However, Meta tags are used to control a site’s description in the search engine results and, when pages include little content, to differentiate one page from another.
The most important Meta tag is the Meta description. Search engines appreciate when every page of a site use a different Meta description, as it is a proof that the site is credible, and present various types of content.
Reitmans.com currently does not use any Meta description… what are you doing Franck?

5. Non SEO friendly technologies
Search engines have issues understanding content made with some specific technologies, including FLASH and JavaScript. It is therefore crucial to make sure that navigation related components do not use such technologies, or at least propose an alternative to search engines, to make sure than all the pages of the site can easily be accessible to search engines.

6. XML SiteMap
In order to help search engines find all the pages available on a site, an XML Sitemap should be created, installed on the server, and submitted to search engines. This XML Sitemap will contain all the URLs of the site.

7. Link building
If you drop in SERPs after the redesign, link building is a good way to come back on track! Let me explain the concept of link building.
In their ranking algorithm, search engines tend to give additional weight to inbound links, or hyperlinks that point to a website from another site. The reason is simple: it is much more difficult to optimize a network of inbound links than to optimize a website, which increases the integrity of the results returned by search engines.
The more competitive the market, the higher the number of inbound links a website must possess. In competitive markets, site analysis is no longer sufficient to determine which sites deserve to rank among the first results. By analyzing a site’s inbound links structure, it is possible to analyze its credibility, which provides a much more objective measurement than site analysis does.
If site A has a hyperlink pointing to site B, search engines will interpret that link as a vote by site A for site B. Site B thus gains in credibility and in ranking power.
The Google PageRank tells how important a website is. Developed by Google and displayed in the Google toolbar, this index uses a logarithmic scale in the range 0-10. The higher a site’s PageRank, the more important it is considered to be. Very few sites enjoy a PageRank of 10.
The higher the PageRank of site A, the greater the ranking power its vote will confer on site B. In addition, the more hyperlinks there are on a page, the less ranking power each one receives, since this ranking power is distributed.
The anchor is the word or phrase that is at the source of an hyperlink.
Anchors are extremely important to search engines. It is therefore essential to create anchors that include the keywords you want to rank for, as identified in the keyword analysis report.
For example, you would not create a link to yoursite.com using only Yoursitename as an anchor, since the site already ranks for this term. Instead, you could use generic keywords. You should vary anchor texts in order to rank for a variety of terms, as well as to make your anchors look more natural to search engines.
The closer the themes of sites A and B, the greater the ranking power conferred by an anchor will be.

To clonclude, my good friend Thomas Champeval and I tried to find a way to integrate all the Link building strategies from short terms tactics and long term strategies.

I’d love to hear what you think about the black, white and grey hat scale based on your experience … whoever you are a SEM project manager, underground freelancer or SEO experts …

This post was written by Sylvain