
What are your keyword phrases?
The first step that you should take before even touching your site is to check which keyword phrases you are currently raking for. There are various ranking monitors that can be used to find all the phrases that you are ranking for as well as which pages are generating these rankings. Make sure to record your current rankings including the key phrase along with its rank, page found on, and the date. There are many great analytics tools that can be used to track how customers spend time on your site. Use your favorite analytics tool to check which pages are receiving the most traffic and make sure that these pages are prominent on your new site. Try not to delete pages that have a lot of traffic on a daily basis. Also make sure to have new pages for each of your old keyword phrases. The best case scenario is to have a new page to correlate with every old page that Google used to have in its index. If this can’t be done, at least be sure to have pages highlighting all of your most important keyword phrases. This is the best way to stop your rankings from dropping drastically directly after your redesign. Verify that your selected keywords are used during the website design process.Key SEO terms must be used in:
- Title Tag
- Keywords and meta description
- Navigation and menus
- Image file names
- Your Domain
- Alt text for images
- Title attribute in links
- Your primary page or product copy
- Internal and external links
- Footer links and sitemap
- Header Tags – H1 , H2 and H3