It's important from a technical standpoint to get your website redesign right from the start. If the website is built wrong from the beginning, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to appear in Googles search results. These best practices therefore needs to be involved from a early stage when a site is redesigned.
SEO friendly for Google spiders
In order to rank well when someone searches Google, the little "spiders" that control all the websites by checking them out and ranking them also need to check your website. Whether you’re redesigning websites or optimizing existing ones, it’s critical to have clean, SEO-friendly code. SEO-friendly code acts as a guide for search engine spiders by providing a clear view of your site’s content. Your negligance of lacking technical optimization could hurt you dearly.
94% of all searches (in Sweden) are made using Google (numbers based on searches made between July 2014 and July 2015).
Do not use duplicated content - but if you really have to...
If you really need to use duplicated content, make sure to tell the search enginees which one they should index and which one they should not care about. You do this with canonical URL:s, which is the "original" URL. The canonical link element is placed in the head of the page and often looked at as the "301 for search enginees". But instead of being absolute (note that canonical links aren't redirected for the visitor, only for the search enginee) the search engine looks at the page anyway and decides for itself wether the content is duplicated or not. So if you are worried that the page is considered to have duplicated content, the canonical link element is your friend. Remember that duplicated content is punished by the search enginees and will lead to lower results in the SERP.
The canonical link element looks like this, and is placed in the head-tag of the page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://igomoon.com/original-url">
Browsers and Security
Your website should load properly on all major browsers – including older versions. Failing to take this step may exclude a large section of your buyer personas, which can be a costly consequence for a growing business. So technical questions are also important to understand from a strategy perspective. For example my experience says that some industries are major users of Microsoft Explorer, and somtimes older versions ot this platform.
To reduce the potential of browser-based threats we recommend businesses to add SSL certificates to their websites. The evolution of technology has made your company more exposed to advanced security risks that can threaten to compromise your website’s integrity. Websites must prevent security breaches on both the front- and back ends.
Mobile optimization
The website should not only be optimized and accessable from the different browsers, but also from different devices, like mobiles and tablets. Read more about the importance of keeping your website mobile friendly here.
Checklist for technical optimization
- Set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Search Console (old Google Webmaster Tools) correctly.
- Keep track of the site's 404's and 500's.
- Make sure to redirect all old links with the permanent 301 redirect.
- Optimise all titles, meta titles and change any duplicated content.
- Check broken links, errors, or crawl problems.
- Your website should load properly on all major browsers (somtimes including older versions).
Looking for more redesign tips?
Please feel free to download our guide to learn more.