A few months ago, one of our clients decided to redesign their website. It was a law firm and they contracted a marketing agency that specialized in websites for lawyers. Last week, the new site went live so I decided to take a peek to see how it was set up.
I found some pretty egregious errors that prompted me to put together this blog post.
I’m sure I have been guilty of forgetting to do one or more of these items, so this checklist is a good review to make sure your new website is completely optimized at launch time, and that your rankings won’t be hurt from the transition.
1) Robots.txt
When you are re-designing or developing a new website, it is a good idea to “no-index” the test site so the search engines do not pick it up (though best practice is probably to develop the site on your localhost). The last thing you want is for Google to find and index your test site because there is a good chance it will end up ranking for your branded keywords.
This could become a big headache with issues of duplicate content or your test site competing against your main site in rankings.
If you do indeed “no-index” your test site, remember to remove this when you transfer the site over and have it go live! Leaving the site as “no-index” in your robots.txt file is a quick and sure fire way to tell Google not to index your website… (duh!)
2) 301 Redirects
This one can be a pain if you forget to do it before you take down the old site and launch the new site. If you are making any changes to your website structure or site map, make sure you remember to implement 301 redirects.
Always, always, always crawl your site before starting a website re-design (I like to use Screaming Frog). This way you will have documentation of all the pages on your current site.
When you launch your new site, you will need to make sure that all of your old pages are pointing to either its new equivalent, or a similar page on the new website. Remember that many of the pages on your old site will be indexed on Google, and you don’t want to hurt your users’ experience by constantly sending them to 404 error pages.
3) Title Tags And Meta Descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are one of the most important elements of on-site search engine optimization, and often are forgotten when launching a new website. This is where that initial site crawl comes in handy. When you use a tool like Screaming Frog on your old site, it will also capture all the current title tags and meta descriptions, which can be used on the new site.
Of course you will need create new title tags and meta descriptions for any new pages. Don’t forget to preview your title tags and meta descriptions when you do!
4) Don’t Use Frames!
I’m not too sure what they did here… they had two domains: the .com and the .ca. Instead of redirecting one to the other (they are local to the area so they wouldn’t need country specific domains), they created a frame within the .ca that points to the .com site. Again, I have no idea why they would do this. They probably won’t get penalized for duplicate content since it’s a frame, but they definitely aren’t getting any link juice from the different domains. And it would have been much easier to just redirect the domain .
This isn’t necessarily something to keep in mind when doing a site redesign, but just in general for your website. They didn’t fly in 1996 and they don’t fly now.
5) Update Google Analytics
This one is extremely important -- I have been guilty of forgetting to update the Google Analytics information on a new website. This will leave holes in your analytics data so it needs to be done as soon as the new site is live. You can either take the UA code from your current site, or log into your Google Analytics account and get the UA code from there. Either way, it’s a very simple fix and there is no reason to forget to update Google Analytics.
6) Re-Submit Your Website To Google Through Webmaster Tools
Once you have completed all the items on your checklist, it’s time to tell Google what you have done. Make sure you have Google Webmaster Tools setup for your website (it’s a great tool to see your site’s online health and presence, and if there are any errors or issues that need to be addressed). In Google WMT you can submit your site to be re-indexed by Google, as well submit a sitemap for Google to crawl. Google publishes a pretty thorough list of best practices to help Google find and index your website.
This Is What Your Your Branded SERP Result Looks Like If You Forget These Things
This is by no means a comprehensive list of what you should do for a website redesign, but it is a good start to ensure that there is minimal negative effects on your site’s rankings. The last thing you want after you launch your brand new website is for Google (and visitors) to not be able to find it.
Final Words
More than criticism, this is meant as a reminder to all of us of that some of the seemingly small things, make a BIG difference!
If there is anything else you think should be added, post it in the comments, below!
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