Web Site Design Specialists

By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch

Restructuring a site can present some major SEO challenges. It’s one thing to make simple changes, where a page on the new site corresponds exactly to every page on your old site. But it’s much tougher when you’re making more fundamental changes to the layout, organization, and content of your site.

If you have a reasonably popular site, it has several assets that are put at risk when you change its structure:

1. Users will have bookmarked pages on your site. When they attempt to go to that bookmark, you want to make sure they still get to the content they want.
2. Pages from your site show up in search engine results. When users click on these, you’ll want them to find the right pages on your site.
3. Other Web sites link to your site. Yes, you want people who click on those links to get to the right pages in the new structure. But more importantly, you want the search engines to continue to map those links to the most relevant pages on your Web site. Much of this is because search engines count links to your site as votes. You don’t want to lose the votes. The contextual relevance of the links are also a big factor. While a 301 redirect will pass the raw link juice through (in the classical PageRank sense), you still want those inbound links to point to highly relevant pages. Lose the relevance of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, and you’ve lost a lot of its value. Similarly, search engines expend a lot of effort to determine how much they trust a Web site. Much of this relates to the trust and authority they associate with the sites and pages that link to you. Mess with that trust and you put your historical traffic at risk.

Bottom line: there’s a lot at stake when you restructure a Web site. Success requires a full understanding of how to map the content from the new site to the old site, and building a 301 redirect map that thoroughly maps links from the old site to the new one.

Don’t skimp on this process! It’s tempting to apply the 80-20 rule here, especially if you have a large site, but that could be the most expensive 20 percent you’ve ever passed on. Let’s break down the approach to doing this well:

1. Wherever possible, create a one-to-one mapping of pages from the old site to the new site. This means finding pages that are identical, or substantially similar to the old ones.
2. Analyze all the remaining pages to find ones that you can redirect to the correct category. An example of this might be individual product pages you had on the old site, but on the new site you offer only a higher-level page for that category of products on the new site. In that case, map the product pages on the old site to the surviving category page.
3. Make sure that all the remaining pages are redirected somewhere. For most sites, the place where you should send this redirect will be the home page. Note that if you also change the domain in this process, you may also want to implement a catchall redirect that sends all pages not covered by your explicit redirect rules to the home page of the new site.

When you must prioritize, here are a few techniques you can use to make sure you’ve truly covered the most important pages:

• Go into your Web analytics tool and identify the top pages receiving traffic.
• Go into Google Webmaster Tools and get a list of your external links, so you can identify all pages that have received external links.
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to identify the top pages listed there. Site Explorer tends to list the most important pages first.

Next, make sure that the search engines find your 301 redirects. While it’s common advice to update your sitemap to the new site on day one, consider leaving the old site’s sitemap in place for a period of time, to help the search engines see the 301 redirects (hat tip to Stephan Spencer for this idea).

How long should you leave it that way? That depends primarily on the size of your site and the number of pages that the search engines crawl on a daily basis. At a minimum, make sure that the prioritized pages list we developed above has been thoroughly crawled.

Lastly, use Google Webmaster Tools and Live Search Webmaster Tools to see what 404 errors they report after the move. This can be a sign that they tried to access a page on the old version of the site that’s no longer there, and that isn’t properly redirected.

Use this to give you clues as to mistakes you made in the process. Also, monitor key SERPs and traffic levels.

Ultimately, though, success depends on the work you do up front. Don’t take it lightly. This is a case where it’s far easier to do it right the first time, rather than trying to fix it later.

By Steve Haar, Search Engine Watch

I started a hunt last week. I am looking for a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) book to give to those decision-makers who will never actually do SEO, but who cut the check or approve the time spent for SEO. I haven’t found it yet…but I just started.

Too often, I have seen companies “approve” SEO only to treat it as a one-time hit, or a short-term project. Months or years later, when they asked someone else to “do” SEO for them, it is discovered that the company had laid none of the basic foundation for SEO, and it is clear that even the implementation was done incorrectly. Unfortunately, no follow-up or long-term measurement plan is in place that would catch this. From what I hear, this is not uncommon.

So, absent a book and being too impatient to wait for one, I thought I would come up with some guidelines for those who approve SEO.

But first, for clarity, when I write SEO I am referring to web page optimizing against organic search. Optimizing paid search is a closely related, but different animal.

So, if you are going to embark on organic SEO…

1. Plan to keep in it for the long haul. Line up the resources to engage SEO for at least 6 months. An entire year would be better. This is not the long haul, this is just the time you need to validate the program for the longer term. These resources will come from many parts of the company; from your marketing and sales to finance and IT. Be ready to go after them before you start.
2. Be patient. SEO can take time to generate results depending on your starting point. You may not see your sales (or other target metric) increase right away. Unlike most other online efforts, there is no immediacy about organic SEO.
3. Set objectives. The goals for SEO must be clear and the benchmarks to achieving them agreed upon. This means setting up measurement capabilities that may not currently exist as well standard reporting procedures. At the start, there may be no ‘measured’ metric to report, no changes. Reporting should be done anyway and include the steps taken to improve the metric, not just the metrics themselves.Brace yourself; the SEO folks may appear to be goofing off. They will be surfing the net, looking at SERPs, looking at web pages, and reading blogs or articles. These are necessary parts of the program. Earlier, I mentioned monthly reporting. This helps you know the progress of the project and gives you an idea of what is accomplished with the daily activity that may seem a little out of the ordinary for typical business operations.
4. Keep people informed. They need to know your plans and those of the company. Any new products or product changes impact your web site. With enough fore-planning, your SEO team can help generate the traffic early on. And just as importantly, they can plan to gracefully handle traffic currently going to pages for phased-out products. Well informed SEO teams can add value and prevent surprises. Leverage them.
5. Set expectations. If you outsource SEO, don’t jump for promises of absolutes. There are none.

A Final thought: nothing is free, especially clicks. Enter into SEO knowing that there is a cost. It may be outsourcing costs, new people, or the opportunity costs of current people being refocused. I get very concerned when I hear organic SEO talked about as a way to get free clicks. It blinds people to the commitment needed and the value of SEO. Like everything else, tie the increases in target metrics to the cost of the SEO activity. This gives you a view into SEO ROI.

• Age of web site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains and negative scoring for such activity
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• A common postal address on the “contact us” page
• Hosting uptime
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs