Imagine a successful site, totally dependent on internet traffic for Sales, enjoying good ranking across the board and a Google Page Index of 6. Yep, made in the shade and nothing could be finer.
Then imagine that the ‘former’ management decided to redesign the site, chucking all previous content and layout, opting for an almost pure graphical page structure. Then imagine no titles, keywords or descriptions and if there are any, they are not what were being used to get them their previous results.
No way! It cannot happen! Nobody can be that stu. Ahem.. well yes they can. In that case it was us. Part of my 18 hour days over the past three months was repairing the damage that occurred from that 30 days of blissful ignorance. It cannot happen to a member of this intelligent, savvy crowd? Sorry, it happens and will happen and the real question is what are you going to do when it does happen to a client, friend or potential customer. I was not part of the team that did the new work but I have had to spend a wasteful and resentful majority of my time over the past 90 days rebuilding the house.
We, like many firms took our position and rank as just a nice little bonus for being us. Arrogant? Yes, like everyone in this tech sector, we thought we knew everything about everything. Sure we had a rocking search engine placement firm doing our work, but hey, we were geeks, why even think about it. We had a great designer, great staff, so apparently the decision came down to redo everything. This in and of itself isn’t bad, in fact, regular site redraws are important as a coffee shop repainting every couple of years. Customers need to see a change (that is ordinary people, not geeks who love the way Freshmeat has stayed true..) and site owners have to do it. What we did was plain stupid and we are in the process of preparing a handbook of steps a site owner needs to track so that their foot doesn’t wind up in the proverbial doo-doo like ours did. What I want to share is the broad points in this article which will of course seem as obvious as “Throw grenade AFTER you pull ! the pin” but when you are standing there well sometimes it isn’t that obvious.
1. Plan the new site from a SEO point of view before you make graphics and layout the page structure. Some structures and graphics do not lend themselves to optimal SEO work. Better to force the design around some basic SEO principles than to have to fit your optimization stuff around a bunch of pretty, yet poorly placed graphics.
2. White board out all your pages for flow, navigation and SEO. See it before you code it.
3. Don’t go live until you have made sure you have carried over your last SEO work. Add to success; don’t replace it with failureread this over and over until it makes sense.
4. Make sure you have a .htaccess file that tells the engines where to find your new pages DO NOT JUST GO LIVE.If you do, and a search engine hits your site and gets a face full of 404, you will be spanked and spanked like you never thought possible.
5. Double check before you go live that you have in fact done all the preceding steps. Let an outsider take a peek. If you use a SEO company for your work, shame and double shame if they have not been involved in the new re-draw.
6. Make sure you have a copy of the last rankings with the old format and follow the new rankings religiously. When you see the new pages have gracefully popped in the engines and replaced your old stuff, breath a sigh of relief.
7. Do not destroy the backup copies of the old site really,. really, really.. do not do this (You may have, despite of 1-6 above, forgotten something)
Then there’s the “what if you don’t do the steps 1-7 as outlined?” Well, you will fall like a rock from the search engines leaving a glowing trail across the internet before coming to rest as a charred piece of “I told you so” on the side of the information highway. Yep, it sucks. Really sucks.
So when you have a client that you have spent a great deal of your time (and their money) making things work, hand them a pamphlet titled: ” What never to do to your site”. Believe me, they will still know better than you but later, when they realize to their horror how little they know, they will thank you for the pamphlet and at least if they don’t, you’ll at least have warned them.
Robert Gagnon is Founder & CEO FroZen Dirt Media (a software development firm/ASP) and
WeDoHosting.com (From Bunker Grade Hosting to Shopping carts). Robert came
to the “net” industry in 1998 after many years in Retail management and
marketing.
rob@wedohosting.com
www.wedohosting.com
