Will A Site Re-Design Affect My Search Engine Ranking?

The title of this post pretty much sums up the question that so many people ask on a daily basis. With the web growing more day by day, it is becoming ever so vital for us as webmasters, to provide quality content and get rankings. What’s even more important than getting those rankings is actually keeping them. This is where 90% of people begin to slack off. Keeping your rankings is vital to mainting your business and web presence.

How does one keep their rankings if they want to change their website architecture or structural integrity? It’s a lot easier than you may think. As you know already (hopefully), content is the key starting point for a great website. After that comes internal linking structure followed by the confirmation of other websites “voting” for yours.

When you are going about changing your website layout (and I wouldn’t recommend doing that too often), it is important to keep the internal linking structure “as is”. If you have great rankings already, I would not suggest that you go and change the way your pages link to each other. If your site is brand new and you are just conducting a “redo”, then I wouldn’t see a problem with this.

Next up on the list is imagery. Everybody loves images. We are human beings and we love to see, feel, touch, and hear stuff. This is why video is such a great application for websites and marketing. You have to keep yourself in check though and be careful not to overdue it with these goodies. Don’t get me wrong, flash and video is a good way to present your business or website, but it cannot be “read” in the same way a useful article can.

Content is the key as you can imagine. As long as you keep your site’s linking structure together, and keep the same content you have, while NOT changing the URL of your web pages, you should be fine. Stick to the sound principles of web design, functionality, and layout, and you will be off to the races in no time!