Q: I am looking to relaunch my website but I am worried all the coding and SEO I have worked hard to optimise will be lost. Please could you advise the best way to proceed in order to retain my page rank?
Sep 13 2011
Answered by: Clifford McDowell Ask a question
If you’re only making changes to the look of your site – for example the fonts and backgrounds – then your SEO will remain the same. It’s content that makes the big difference to your SEO. A few content changes here and there are fine – in fact, search engines really like new additions to your website. So, if you regularly make small updates to your site, Google and friends will often reward you by visiting your site more often and pushing your site higher up the search engine results pages.
However, if you are making big, dramatic changes, perhaps deleting all your old content in favour of entirely new keywords and images, then it’s unavoidable that your SEO will take a small dip. Your rankings will remain roughly the same until Google re-visits the site to analyse the content. As long as you make sure to include the relevant keywords in the new content and add tags to your new images and headers, then you should retain your high position on the search engines.
We strongly recommend that you don’t change your domain name – this really will cause your rankings to suffer and waste all your hard work. When your domain name changes, then all the information that the search engines have been building up about your website is lost and you have to start your SEO from the beginning – which no one wants! This is also true if you change the URL of individual pages, but you can recover from this when the search engine next visits your website.
There are quite a few things you can do in the relaunch to help improve your SEO. Add a news or Twitter feed to your pages; this counts as ‘fresh’ content, which the search engines love. You could also add a rotating banner, ensure that keywords are included in your headers and titles or even rewrite your content to target different keywords that have the potential to attract more website visitors.”
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