By now, you know that web design and SEO are like 5 and 6; you don’t develop one without the other.
If you have been treating them like separate entities, you need to revisit the sites you have built. Over time, with new developments, site audits and maybe customer preferences, web redesign becomes necessary. When you do this, it is important you don’t leave out SEO—if you want optimal results.
This post outlines an SEO checklist that will guide your activities. As a designer or web owner, involving an SEO specialist is critical to ensuring a fully-functional site redesign.
Initial website set up
- Set your development website to no follow, no index
- Verify that the search engine-friendly URL are well-positioned
Not sure how? Consult any leading web design and website development company Ottawa, and they will tell you how. Next is content planning? You design needs to be developed to accommodate web content.
Content planning
- Use Netspeak Spider or a similar tool to crawl the existing website and get a full list of the URL
- Analyse SEMrush or Google Search Console to record the top landing pages
- Map listed or specific keywords to URLs and build and SEO sitemap
- Study the content silos and verify the parent/sub group relationships are in order
Creating content
- Write fresh, 100% original content with at least 1,000 words
- Ensure your content is proofread thoroughly for grammatical errors and types
- Design the content to be easily read (use sub-headers, shorter paragraphs, bullet points and so on)
- Check that the content has the right description usage and meta title
- Review the top landing pages to confirm content quality and make sure SEO is in order
Every leading web design and website development company in Ottawa worth its salt knows that this checklist is key to a smooth transition. Unless you don’t want your site ranking high for keyword search, you shouldn’t omit any of these steps.
What could go wrong in web design and development?
In many cases, process errors are not caused by an inept or malicious designer, but due to inexperience and poor communication.
The following are causes of SEO mistake caused during a sit re-design.
- Allowing the wrong set of people to perform certain services. Instead of an SEO specialist, a company may delegate its IT department or marketing executives to handle the project. It often leads to disastrous result.
- Placing site “beauty” ahead of information or usability. Even if you have an aesthetically appealing site, when people don’t find what they want, they will bounce off. Don’t let this cost you potential visitors.
When you are redesigning a website, consider these important factors and use them to boost web performance. Design and SEO are two inseparable elements, don’t treat them otherwise.
