The question of whether or not to change your site structure may arise if you are planning on making some on-page SEO adjustments, redesigning your website, or making other major changes to its structure.
Altering your website structure can easily end up being an SEO disaster in many ways if you aren’t properly prepared for it, and it’s even more dangerous for well-established websites to do so without the guidance of SEO services in New York.
Before you plan on making changes to your website structure, be sure to meet with an experienced SEO company in New York and plan everything out to avoid a ranking disruption.
A website redesign or restructuring can easily result in disrupted rankings
Frequently, when websites are restructured or redesigned, current rankings are punished as a result of poor execution.
Website restructurings should almost always be supervised by a New York SEO service with experience in web development, even if it is mainly handled in-house, in order to ensure that website rankings remain stable.
A number of crucial steps must take place during your restructuring in order to protect your rankings. Many web developers are not trained in these techniques, but they can work in conjunction with an experienced New York SEO company in order to ensure that the website changes are SEO friendly.
Some of the steps that are needed include:
- Working on changes to a test website, not a live website in order to prevent bugs from popping up and affecting usability.
- Matching the website structure of the updated and the older website, including using a crawler to map out the website.
- Saving the original website information including a list of every webpage.
- Using SEO friendly 301 redirects for any pages which have changed URLs in order to protect rankings.
- Making every change to a test website until it is 100% ready to launch, and keep the test website from being indexed in the search engines to prevent duplicate content indexing.
- Making sure that every old URL is properly redirected without any dead URLs.
- Tracking backlinks and ensuring that all of them are updated to new URLs if possible.
These are just a few of the most common steps involved with smooth a website structure change, and there is often much more that is required. Major website adjustments involve a multi-step and complex process, and it should almost never be performed for the sole purpose of increasing rankings.
It’s much better to add more pages and bulk up on your blogging
Any experienced SEO service in New York will advise that it’s almost always better to increase your blogging frequency and add more internal pages to increase your website’s ranking. By including targeted keywords naturally throughout your new content and publishing blogs frequently, you will be notifying the search engines on a more regular basis.
The key is to turn your website into a top resource for your readers, so that they rely on your content and check back on your website often for updates. You’ll very likely see higher levels of traffic with more frequent blog updates, along with establishing a social media presence and ensuring that your content is connected to your social media.
For any questions about updating your site structure and related SEO concerns, be sure to contact one of the experts at Stillwater Media Group, a top SEO company in New York by calling us at (855)-848-9810.
