SEO & Site Redesign Errors

I'd like to redesign my website but am concerned as I'm number one in most major search engines and get 2500 visitors a day, plus sell many books daily.
Robert Joy LED #2160

Robert

Using the "site:www.weddingsweddings.com" query - Google shows that they know about 65 pages at your site. Whatever you do, keep your existing filenames for all of those pages and don't remove that existing content. If you must remove any of the previous pages, be sure that you implement a 301 permanent redirect to send the search engine spiders as well as visitors who may find those previous links in search engine results pages. Instructive 301 Permanent Redirect article.

You might also consider adjusting your title tags (without dropping your existing keywords from those tags) if you want to rank for anything OTHER than Wedding Ceremonies - as that is the same title tag on almost every page of your site. Keeping the existing body text would be wise as well. If you must re-write it extensively, consider making new pages rather than changing the existing pages. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If you don't want those old (existing) pages visible - just don't link to them from your new menu - but do keep them on a sitemap linked from your index page. You appear not to have a sitemap currently.

I'm currently working to recover rankings for a client that had about the same number of pages, but their re-design dropped two-thirds of those pages entirely. The method I used to save the rankings was simply to take previous text from the old design and paste it into the new design template and apply the old filenames to 60 pages - then write title tags which reflected the content on each page.

If that content had been unavailable, I would have proposed that we add 50 pages or so of text - but writing the content over again would be vastly more expensive than using the existing - already ranking text in the new design template.

I was just contacted last week by a web design company that was doing a redesign of a well ranking site and didn't want to lose ranking. Apparently it is time for lots of re-design and spring cleaning of tired and musty sites - just don't can your old text and be certain to keep your old filenames in that cleanup. I wrote an article on this in October of 2004 which I constantly refer people to who ask about SEO and site redesign.

Good luck with your re-design and continued good ranking!

Mike Banks Valentine
SEOptimism.com