So your websites bringing in traffic and your ranking on the first page for the majority of your keyword phrases, but it’s missing something. It looks old and you have an idea of a new all singing, all dancing website complete with calls to action, navigational menu’s and a killer logo to die for.

Imagine how much your heart would sink if all of a sudden, your snazzy new website, lost all its visitors, in fact you have to check twice just to make sure you have installed Google analytics correctly. This could be a reality if you don’t follow some simple rules to transfer across all your SEO juice from your old site to your new site.

Domains, Hosting, Redirect – If you have purchased a new domain for your site, whether it is a rebrand or a keyword rich domain, one of the best ways to preserve your SEO juice is to redirect it effectively. This is normally done with the search engine friendly way of a 301 redirect. This will effectively transfer all of your SEO goodness from your old domain to your new domain, including the less important page rank.

Keyword’s You Are Already Ranking For – It is very important before a redesign that you know exactly which keywords you already ranking well for. To do this use a ranking tool, and note the keyword, the page indexed, the position in the search engine result pages, and the date you checked.

Use Analytics – To make sure you are not missing your best money pages, use an analytics tool such as Google analytics and check which pages are getting the most traffic, to do this go to content>top content (set dimensions to source). Make sure that your new site has the same high ranking pages as your old site. Use the same keyword density, making sure the keywords are mentioned the same number of times in the title, meta tags, body text and image descriptions.

Beware Of the CMS – Don’t get me wrong I love Content management systems (CMS). However, the most frustrating part is because the pages are created dynamically the pages don’t actually exist. To conquer this and to give search engine’s something to index, the content is all pulled together and given a url, with lots of dashes, session id’s and other search engine un-friendly items. Make sure you url’s are nice and friendly. Most content management systems have a way of making the url’s search engine friendly and can help to create keyword rich pages.

Behind The Scenes – Here is where a certain tool called “Google webmaster tools” becomes your friend. To hurry along the indexing of your site within Google you will want to submit a new sitemap (this tells Google what pages you next them to index), robots.txt file (to tell Google which pages you want them to ignore, logins, private data etc) and don’t forget a nice friendly 404 error page. Even with the best planning in the world you may have a rogue page that no longer exists and to help search engines and users find their way back to your site, you’ll need a page which links back to indexed pages.

One point I MUST STRESS many web designers and web developers will set your site to “no index, no follow” whilst they develop the new site. This tells Search engines not to index your site. Once the site is live, make sure they put it back to “index, follow” or your SEO will have a heart attack as your suddenly disappears into the ether along with all the sweat, blood and tears put into your current rankings.