Question about SEO
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- 15 Responses
- trooperbill0
^ i tried but by the time id finished a draft the info was out of date :(
- dbloc0
trooper you should write and SEO e-book
- trooperbill0
I was a full time web designer/front end developer for 7 years before i moved into SEO (for the money) and still do projects on the site regularly. #themoreyouknow im not an evil seo hell bent on rankings at the expense of design. i love well designed sites and dispare when a design is beautiful but misses obvious optimisation or is badly coded.
- trooperbill0
@moldero thats a bold claim.
- moldero0
if their niche is small enough that could explain their currently good SEOs, and if thats the case, it would be hard to mess them up with any decent SEO module atleast.
- zarkonite0
I think that what detritus is saying is that some of the changes you're advocating would seem to decrease the quality of the user experience, and it's often the case that SEO optimization seems to fly in the face of good design.
I'm actually curious to understand why you shouldn't have site-wide links on, say, a header? and what would hiding the login link into a seperate page do exactly?
Thanks for your input!
- usability is no good without traffic. the OP asked how he should approach the job without messing up seotrooperbill
- I understand, I'm just trying to educate myself =)zarkonite
- trooperbill0
whats the URL - i'll give you some things i'd do to improve seo based on site architecture.
- trooperbill0
@detritus learn how internal page rank works and you'll see the logic behind it
@cincodemayo - yes you run that risk. your basically changing pagerank flow throughout the site. like i said before i'd start by replicating the structure of whats already there then making and measuring small changes so you know what to reverse should things go wrong.
- and also remember it takes a while for google to recognise your changestrooperbill
- CincodeMayo0
I'm pretty new to SEO so bare with me, but it sounds like as long as I keep the URLs, navigation and copy the same it shouldn't affect rankings too much? But there's a chance ranking can drop if I want to condense pages and clean up the copy?
- trooperbill0
no its about minimising risk in the early stages then testing and iteration to build momentum
- Sounds like a hack to me.detritus
- SEO is awesome when it makes the site harder to use. I've never heard of removing global nav elements to help rankingshereswhatidid
- detritus0
If I read that right, steps 1 & 2 swap site logic and usability for an SEO hack?
I hate SEO and everything about it.
- trooperbill0
square space sucks for seo.
heres what you need to know t safeguard their rankings.
1. keep the urls the same
2. keep the navigation the same
3. keep the titles the same
4. keep the text content the sameto improve their rankings
1. remove site-wide functional links i.e. terms and conditions, privacy policy, cookies, login, view (empty) basket and place them all within a support section
2. add keywords into this functional content and link back to products and services
3. flatten the sites architecture using a mega menu to make every category accessible within one click
4. add rel=prev/next to pagination
5. download the free microsoft seo toolkit and fix all of the errors it finds
once your new design is in place give it 3 months to bed inthen slowly change the things you dont like an item at a time and wait a month to make sure your changes dont affect the sites rankings
- monNom0
If you keep the old domain around you can put redirects (301? 302?) on the pages to tell visitors and bots that the content has moved. Essentially you'd need to remap all your old end-points to the new URLs.That way you keep the pagerank/inbound links and the new links take over after a time.
That's just my general understanding. I'm neither an SEO guy, or much good with servers.
- CincodeMayo0
Thanks moldero. Although I think I'm going with Squarespace, so I don't know if Yoast works (nor do I actually know anything about Yoast - or SEO really). That's why I don't want to switch without knowing the full consequences. But good to know it will go up after it goes down...hopefully it won't fluctuate too much though. They're at the top of their ranking.
- moldero0
I imagine it will go down & then back up again, the copy has a lot to do with it these days, just use something like Yoast plugin for WP and dont forget to resubmit your new sitemaps n stuffz
- CincodeMayo
My parents business has a website thats nothing special...thinking of sprucing it up for them and giving them a whole new look.
It's managed by some web tech but he's definitely not a designer. The IT side of their site is great, especially their SEO, but the design lacks. Thinking of moving them to Squarespace or Wordpress.
I really want to help them redo their site and get it up to date. Problem is, they have an awesome SEO ranking and I don't want to screw that up.
If I'm keeping the same domain name and a lot of the same site copy, will the current SEO rankings stay or is there a danger that they'll lose their ranking?
Any help is much appreciated.