Can I redesign my site without losing my rankings?

It's a common question among people who so badly want a newer looking website, but don't want to lose the great search engine visibility that they are seeing. How much is too much, and if it drops will it ever come back?

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that anyone can make you as to whether your rankings will go up, down, or remain the same. However if things are done correctly you can certainly minimize the risk of them going down.

Keep File Names the Same:
You need to make sure that you keep the file names the same where possible. So for example if you have a page for products and the file name is products.htm you want to be sure that you keep this file name. If for some reason you can not keep the file name products.htm, then you want to be sure you can use 301 redirects before you start changing the names. 301 redirects are a search engine friendly way of telling the robots that the page that used to be called products.htm is now called cleaning-products.htm.

Keep Title Tags the Same:
Just like the file names you want to be sure that you keep the title tags of your current pages intact. The slightest change could make the spiders give your page a different "score" for their listings. Of course it could turn out to be a good thing if your visibility and rankings increase, however you may not want to take that risk.

Keep the Content to Same:
Whenever possible you want to try and keep the main content on each page the same or increased. For example if you have a page for widgets and it has 3 paragraphs of information about your widgets you want to try and keep that info intact. Reducing it or removing it will make the search engines look at that page again and decide if it is as relevant as it was before.

Always have a Sitemap:
A sitemap is important because it is a page with links to all the pages on your website. When the search engines crawl your site and find this page they can easily see all the pages that are available for them to crawl. There is no hard evidence that this helps your search engine visibility but it certainly can't hurt.

These are just a few tips to help improve your chances of redesigning your website without haring your search engine visibility.

Remember: Change can be a good thing, but there is such thing as too much change.

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization