SEO Step By Step Guide– 78. Dealing with your Website Changes

Every website will have its own life cycle and during its life cycle in most cases, it will be redesigned under the pretext of revamping. Redesign is not the only change a website undergoes, it faces various other changes at various levels. Some of the changes that we can think of include,
1.    Addition of new pages
2.    Addition of new programming modules
3.    Domain name changes
4.    Change of URLs of the inner pages
5.    Website design change
6.    Website content change
7.    Web host change, etc

All these changes are done to our website with the hope of improving its online performance. Contrary to our expectations, in most cases the website’s existing ranking too deteriorates. Before the new website gets some decent ranking, it will be too late. Our competitors would have gone a long way leaving us behind. Many more new competitors would have emerged making the fight all the more tougher. So as soon as you decide to do a site revamp or make changes to your existing site in anyway, however minor it is, first discuss them with your SEO specialist. A number of companies skip this step and end up in problems. We contract a web design company or make use of our in house designers or programmers to implement the changes. We don’t give as much importance to the site’s SEO as the website’s graphical interface. This can put us through terrible SEO disadvantage. Unless you hire a company that is familiar or conversant with the SEO principles, they will not be able to guide you through the change effectively without affecting your website’s current ranking. You might have worked for years to get reach where you are in the search engines. Even a minor change can make things topsy-turvy.

You need to take appropriate precautions before you implement the changes whether it is addition of new programming modules, domain name change or other changes. You can save a great deal of time and money by talking to your SEO consultant. Once you lose your ranking you may have to start it all over again from scratch and you know that it is not that easy with the level of competition soaring at exponential levels each day.

Before you implement the changes first get an SEO professional to get your website’s current SEO status, current ranking for all the keywords for which you have optimized your website. Identify the major crowd pullers of your website. Identify the weak areas and keywords that have poor ranking. Get a list of most visited pages and least visited pages. Make a complete SEO report and keep this as your reference point. Identify the sections of your website that will undergo major changes and see the possible negative effect it will have on your website and how it can be prevented. Have a clear cut plan for your SEO so that your rankings are intact. In the future posts let us discuss how to deal with each of the changes listed above in detail.

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