Before you start the redesign and all throughout the process, it’s important you make your SEO strategy a top priority. First, you don’t want to lose the rankings and traffic you’ve built up to now but you also will not want to miss the more targeted visitors you will get when your new and improved site is up and running.

Ignoring the following 6 steps when redesigning your site will put your online position in peril. So if you’re looking for quality web design services, be sure they understand the following before hiring them.

1.  Keep content/keyword rich pages near the top of your site’s hierarchy

Search engines are quite meticulous when seeing how pages within your site are linked together. They use this form of internal link popularity to determine a particular page’s place within your site’s hierarchy. Pages linked from every other page are given more weight than one’s linked from only a few.

In light of this fact, you should be sure your content and keyword-rich pages are placed high within this hierarchy. If a particular page was bringing in a lot of traffic before, don’t bury it too deep within the site.

2. Categorize content by niche markets and avoid duplicate content

Online searchers generally ask questions when initially looking for solutions to their problems or answers to their questions. Therefore, the more ways you can categorize your information for these different issues – or target markets – the better.

Categorize all of your top-level pages to reflect this fact and make it clear your products and services can address their problem. And be sure – regardless of how someone finds a certain bit of information on your site, be sure they end up at the same URL to avoid any duplicate content issues. For example, if a specific product can be listed as both a product and a service, place the same URL in both categories so regardless of how someone views it, they will end up at the same place.

Courtesy of cool-photos.com

3. Stay on top of URLs if transitioning to a new content management system (CMS)

If you’re going to use a new content management system for your site to help better administer it, be sure you place 301 redirects for any URL you have to change. Since search engines will take some time to index new URLs, you want to be sure you maintain your position in the search engines and current traffic levels.

If you must, you should re-direct your top-level pages at minimum. Doing so will quickly pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones – and prevent prior visitors from seeing a 404 error/not found message when they come back.

4. Code links with a navigation menu in a search friendly manner

It’s important you code all links within your navigation menus in a search friendly manner so they can be crawled and pass on those benefits to your rankings position. Many graphic designers don’t realize this – some Flash graphics and DHTML menus are invisible to the search engines, causing them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Therefore, make sure all navigation menu elements are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. Avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation and ensure all content can be reached through their own dedicated links.

5. Be sure your new CMS system allows you to customize HTML elements

While automation may seem nice for HTML elements like titles, meta tags, headers, URLs and alt attributes for headers, it’s imperative your new CMS system allows you to customize these. There should ideally be no limit to the number of characters for each of these elements but do remember, the search engines have limits you should stay within.

6. Avoid session IDs and other tracking links

Tracking visitors on our websites gives us insight into what works and what doesn’t. For ranking purposes though, this can be a double-edges sword. It’s best to avoid these types of internal elements but if you must, be sure the clean URL is the only one given to the search engines. If not, the search engines will duplicate the same page over many URLs, splitting your link popularity.

If your new CMS system has tracking elements inherit within it, be sure you use a canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Sharing these “secrets” with your potential developer may make them feel you’re usurping their knowledge and authority but heck, it’s your money, so be sure whoever your hire has all of the know-how to make your site work. Many professional graphic designers are not SEO experts per se.

They may create some very nice looking websites and marketing materials but it won’t matter too much if it can’t be found.

Some techniques are more SEO related and “behind the scenes” (coding, tags, etc.) but other techniques are more in the layout of a page, its tone and how we communicate important things to know…our new press room page is an experiment to see how creating a more holistic press room can help site visitors – specifically editors, bloggers and journalists – find information more easily.

In fact, even if you never plan to issue any press releases, it’s important you have one place where people like this can learn more about your company and what you do…reaching out to journalists and bloggers is another way to help you get noticed by search engines and prospective customers.

In the past, most pressrooms simply listed a company’s news press releases. However, having a better understanding of what editors and bloggers are looking for in a pressroom allows you to build a more complete resource.

In fact, a main pressroom page can simply serve as a hub where you can link out to not only your press releases but knowledge center resources, blogs, case studies, testimonials and more as shown by this handy flowchart.

Check out SEO Advantage’s new pressroom and our guest blog post on SEO Site Reference for more insights on turning your pressroom into a powerful online marketing resource.

However, before you even start thinking about that, you need to obtain a domain name for your site and reserve the online space that will be the home for your website.

Web hosting is how this is done. Hosting is essentially a service that provides storage for the content on your site, and then displays it on the Internet.

Before you even choose a hosting service like Pair Networks, Bluehost or Vodahost, you need to find a good domain name. Godaddy.com is one place you can go to check the availability of your preferred domain name. Remember, this is how many people will recognize your business online so be careful when choosing a domain name.

Once you have an available domain name, you can go to your chosen web hosting service and pay them a yearly fee for the use of that name. This generally costs anywhere from $8 to $20 per year.

Next, you will need to pay a yearly fee for hosting your website. Costs vary depending on how much space you require but in my experience, this cost around $100 per year. Most services charge on a yearly basis.

Some things you will want to look for in a hosting service:

• Do they allow you to setup sub-domains? Is there a limit on how many domains you can register on an account?
• Do they accept credit cards for easy payment?
• Do they offer email and/or web email services?
• Do they have the ability to include a blogging platform with their services so you can have your own dedicated domain for your blog?
• Do they have dedicated IP addresses for each domain you include? Many low-cost providers will clump several domains on one IP address, which can spell disaster for your site in terms of SEO.

Quality hosting services is essential to being successful online. There are literally hundreds of thousands of providers out there so be careful…beware of low cost hosting services!

If a site seems drab and visually unappealing, it’s to be expected that a person’s time on that page will be very short. That wonderful article or landing page you labored over for hours sits languishing online like a fish out of water.

Now if you’re exclusively a content developer like me, you don’t have to know all the ins and outs of good design. What you do have to understand are some basic fundamentals of what works and what doesn’t so you can be sure that great content you develop shines to its full potential. And knowing it helps when you’re working with a web designer either on your own team or with another company.

Continue reading for some good general guidelines of organization, formatting and designing your web pages. These tips were part of a whitepaper entitled Best Practices for Conversion: The New Engagement Funnel in 7 Steps.

1. Scrutinize your competition

Go through your competitor’s web pages and look at their copy and layout. Document places you feel stumped and then compare this page with yours. Revise or eliminate sections to make yours better.

2. Place most critical page elements within the first 300 pixels

According to usability research from many sources, over half of site visitors do not look “below the fold.” Therefore, get right to the point and keep your value proposition within your screen’s first view.

3. Keep your layout simple

Increase reader comprehension by using a one-column format with ample margins and white space. Limit paragraphs to five lines…dense copy discourages reading. Simple layouts are also more conducive to search engine crawlers and in turn, rankings.

4. Be obvious and use standard usage conventions

Site visitors shouldn’t have to think very much to understand your message and how to use your page. Be clear when describing links and use a standard underline format when linking to another page, like your shopping cart for example.

5. Make sure your page loads quickly

If a page isn’t loading quickly, most visitors will get frustrated and leave – and the more ‘junk’ you have on a page, the longer it will take to load. You should strive for no more than 8 seconds on a dial-up connection (yes, there are many people who still use dial-up to get online.)

Learn more about these and other elements to consider when designing your landing pages. Remember, your landing page is potentially the last place your visitors will see before purchasing. If your goal is lead generation, it’s step 2 in the process. It doesn’t matter if there are only a couple steps or many in your marketing funnel, your landing page needs to excite visitors and build confidence in your products/services and company.

Heat mapping is one such metric that effectively shows you how visitors interact with your landing page. Heat mapping software programs use computer algorithms to simulate where people look and click on your page.

Using a heatmap can allow you to do several things, including:

• Determine exactly where links and ads should go
• Get more visitors to purchase a product or fill out a form
• Predict how site visitors will interact with your page in the future
• Make Web usability testing easy to implement

Heat mapping shows the density of user clicks using a red to green color-coded system. Red indicates a large number of clicks while green indicate fewer clicks.

Here’s a sample heatmap from a U.S. government website.

Not all heat mapping programs are considered the same and while we may recommend one here, we do not guarantee individual results.

Google Analytics offers a tool that shows general web site usage statistics. However, it does not track click ratios for individual links. For instance, if you have two links on the page that go to the same place, Google’s tool will combine the results.

CrazyEgg is another utility that’s much better than Google since it is a visually-based program that allows you to see your page’s effectiveness at a glance. It gives you an idea of how your site is performing from your audience’s perspective, the only perspective that really matters in the end.

Whatever you do, heat mapping is definitely a great tool for helping you increase conversions.

We’ve also made many of the same changes to our blog as well…all the content is the same, but a few changes have been implemented to accomplish the same goal as our web site – make it easier to learn about SEO’s value and importance.

Our web development expert, Gaby Zapien, updated the blog while retaining the look of our brand. Increase font size gives it a more personable feel. And navigation links at the top make it very easy to get to SEO Advantage’s homepage to learn more.

Another, behind-the-scenes change we did was transfer the blog to a new platform, WordPress. Now, it will be easier for us to share graphics and embedded videos in our posts so expect to see more of those in the coming weeks. And, we now have the ability to accept comments!

So take a look around at the new search engine optimization e-blog and tell us what you think!

There are several different approaches to redesigning a web site. Some companies decide to do a complete redesign every few years (or even every year!) However, if your site has built up a good client base or following, it may be worthwhile to simply evolve your site design bit by bit over time. Make changes incrementally, keeping in place major elements that your site visitors will identify with. In addition to retaining that continuity, you’ll also be able to see which changes helped make a difference. If you change everything at once, there’s no way to tell which new aspects may have been the most impactful.

If you were familiar with our previous SEO site design, you’ll see that we’ve kept the grey while just adding colorful pops in the text and images. The menu uses a completely new format: SEO + Copy + Media + Design = Long Term Rankings – and each of these items contains sub pages that go into more detail. The text is larger and there’s a magnifying glass giving the page some dynamic movement. While a bit of a departure from our previous design, it’s still easily recognizable to repeat site visitors and all the same information should still be easy to find.

Let us know what you think!

A new article at the search engine optimization knowledge center from SEO Advantage addresses three features of web pages that can hinder your rankings and how to deal with them.

Pages using Frames, JavaScript and Flash CAN be optimized for the search engines – BUT, each presents their own unique challenges.

While it’s best not to use Frames, JavaScript and Flash, web pages without them are easier for search engines to crawl and index…there are ways to minimize any negative effects of these features if they are a must.

Read the article here.

Find the tips of the trade that can accelerate your rankings to the top…and, know what to avoid and what to do to stay at the top.

SEO Advantage will constantly monitor the forums and seek resources that will help give you a sense of what longstanding professionals in SEO are thinking…of course, if you have a specific issue, post it in the forum and see what the veteran SEOs have to say about it.

Topics run the gamut – keyword research, directory listings, link building, search engine friendly web design and more.

Check here often to see what’s percolating in the search engine forums – and of course, check back for our own feature articles on search engine optimization tips and current events.

Here are Gaby’s answers, revealing some great professional insights. Enjoy!

Maria: What does your job entail?

Gaby: Keeping all our sites and clients’ websites up to date and working properly.
Posting any necessary edits, making sure the code is up to the current standards, and also that the visuals are appropriate and eye-catching.

For new projects, I research competitors and the requirements for the site, then build and test, starting with a creative concept that I work on usually with a copywriter at SEO Advantage.

Maria: Walk me through your day.

I start checking emails, because this is the way I receive all the tasks.
Then I prioritize and start tackling one at a time!

Maria: How do you feel your role as a graphic designer enhances SEO Advantage’s or any other company’s website?

Gaby: SEO is mostly based on content and the architecture of the site. But let’s face it, no one likes an “ugly” site. I feel that if the content is presented in the best possible way, the user is more likely to spend more time browsing on the site. Graphics and photographs make content more memorable and help prospects better understand the content. In this way, graphic design supports the goals of the web site by engaging the prospect once the SEO brings the traffic to the site.

Plus, nowadays, designers should also be responsible for site usability and standards compliance. This means I have to make sure that the design and functionality works across browsers and that navigation through the site is clear and the actions we want a site visitor to take are supported by the design and layout elements.

[Ed. note: I love this about Gaby! Many designers I've worked with in the past are focused on making your site "pretty" but give no thought to usability. Gaby has a very good sense of how to direct traffic through "paths" on the site and where emphasis needs to be to achieve the business goals of the site.]

Maria: What is your favorite book? Song?

Gaby: There are too many books I like. Fortunately, some of the tasks I perform allow me to listen to audiobboks!

Maria: Do you work from home? If so, do you find it difficult?

Gaby: I do work from home in a sort of “virtual workplace”. Our teams use online tools to communicate and coordinate. I really like it, but it requires a lot of discipline. And sometimes it gets lonely. It does have a lot of advantages, but I think it’s not for everyone.

Maria: What computer software do you swear by to help create your best work?

Gaby: Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver.

Maria: Where do you get your inspiration for creative content? If not creative, then where do you get your inspiration to create designs that produce traffic to the site being created?

Gaby: I find inspiration online just browsing other sites. I also notice things in magazines that can give me ideas, but really, inspiration is everywhere. As a graphic designer, I naturally notice how shapes and colors are used no matter what I’m looking at.

Maria: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Gaby: Still in this field. This is something I love. I would definitely be designing, but you may see me building a bigger design group for SEO Advantage employing other designers who can help with production, while I focus more on the creative aspect.

Maria: What is your personal motto, referring to your work style?

Gaby: “Everything can be done. Some things just take a bit more time.”

Maria: If you have one word to describe your personality and work style, what would it be?

Gaby: It would be hard in one word…

I think whoever likes graphic design is really lucky – it’s the kind of job that doesn’t feel like a job, and most times gives you the flexibility to work from home or any place you like!