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January 6, 2012 In Website Design

Enhance Web Design, but Keep the Old Site Handy

Are you considering website redesign for your business? I’ll begin by defining what I mean by website assets:

To put it simply, your existing website holds some critical brand criteria that will be significant in maintaining your brand and message even as you redesign your website. Assets include content, existing inbound links, current keyword rankings, and conversion tools like contact forms or registration pages all need to make the transition to your new website.

Why?

Often times, keywords and conversion tools like contact pages are tied to your existing analytics plan, which allows you to gauge the success of your website before, during and after the a website redesign.

When business owners look to redesign a website without the assistance of a web development and marketing team, some or all of these assets could be lost in the website upgrade, which could make existing analytics or engagement tracking tools moot. Without analytics and engagement tools, there is no way to verify if that your website redesign has benefited your business, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

With this in mind, the following checklist will help businesses looking to redesign their website to maintain the vital assets that live within their existing website:

  • Determine how many pages you have.
  1. Look at all the pages you have and do a quick sweep for those that are no longer relevant to your brand, products or services.
  • Figure out which pages are most popular/powerful.
  1. Using your analytics tools (such as Google Analytics, etc.), see which pages get the most quality traffic from your target market.
  • Determine how many inbound links you have and on which interior website pages they exist.
  1. Powerful, inbound links from high-ranking, niche websites offer organic SEO benefits and should be kept in place.
  1. Three tools for researching and assessing website inbound links are:

Backlink Watch

Link Diagnosis

Link Popularity Tool at MarkLeap

  • Determine what keywords you rank for before the move and figure out which keywords are most effective.
  • Your analytics tools will come in handy here, or you can use tools like:

Google Keyword Tool Box

SEOBook

If business owners do not fully understand the importance and practice of proper SEO, doing a web redesign on their own can be more damaging than helpful. Not comfortable with SEO work? It may be best to hire a specialist to perform the redesign so all the hard work already put into a web presence does not disappear. Considering that, it may also be time to contact a professional to set you up with a system that can track these metrics if you don’t already have a system in place.

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