SEO FOR REDESIGN Eric Werner

DON’T WAIT “ We are going to wait until the redesign is complete to work on SEO” No problem unless any of the following are important:  User experience  Traffic to your site  Saving money Involve the SEOs early in the process Slide 1 SEO FOR REDESIGN

QUESTIONS TO ASK Why bother? Slide 2 SEO FOR REDESIGN

OTHER QUESTIONS TO ASK Are URLs going to change? Is the domain changing? Is the CMS going to change? Are there pages that are being added or removed? Slide 3 SEO FOR REDESIGN

BENCHMARKS Page speed for each template Number of pages indexed in Google & Bing 404 Errors Broken links Rankings & Traffic User Behavior Slide 4 SEO FOR REDESIGN

PLANNING What kind of CMS are you going to use? Can we crawl a similar website that you have done recently? Can we adjust page title, URLs, headers? What drives the breadcrumb? Number of links out per page Internal linking Naming conventions Semantic Markup Slide 5 SEO FOR REDESIGN

PLANNING Slide 6 SEO FOR REDESIGN Not exactly SEO… But…  What action do you want people to take when they get to your site?  Establish dollar values for these goals  Be ready to set up goals in your analytics platform

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Slide 7 SEO FOR REDESIGN HOME ABOUT US DONATE GET INVOLVED STUFF THAT PEOPLE SEARCH FOR

DURING DEV Make sure that your staging site is not accessible by the spiders! Slide 8 SEO FOR REDESIGN

AT LAUNCH Are the pages that they promised to 301 redirect properly redirecting? Check titles, meta descriptions and H1s Check Robots.txt Submit XML sitemap to Webmaster Tools Try to crawl the site Check for duplicate content -Implement canonical if necessary Check rankings for top pages Slide 9 SESSION TITLE

VIDEO Don’t put all of the videos on the same page Each video should have a unique URL Submit a video XML sitemap Keyword optimized captions Social share buttons next to the video Videos tagged with relevant keywords Transcribe video Markup video using schema.org Slide 10 SEO FOR REDESIGN

WHAT TO AVOID Important content in Flash or iframes AJAX Navigation that cannot be crawled Getting started without an SEO involved! Slide 11 SEO FOR REDESIGN

WHAT TO AVOID Getting started without an SEO involved! Slide 12 SEO FOR REDESIGN

NOT EXACTLY SEO BUT Post launch check to make sure that your analytics code is working for every page Also make sure that conversion goals are updated If you are doing paid search or any kind of advertising make sure that you aren’t paying to send people to a 404 page! Slide 13 SEO FOR REDESIGN

What did you think? Evaluate this session! Or, search by session title at When you evaluate a session, you will be entered to win a prize!