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Answers to some of the thousands of questions asked by marketing executives who attended the AMA's first free Web seminar, "Why Can't My CEO Find Our Website??"
If you've already started redesigning your site, STOP! You should already be thinking about search engines. If you planning on redesigning your site in the new future, then start thinking about search engines now, before you hire a designer.
The first step in designing a website is to go and see how people are searching related to your products or services. When you know what people are seeking, you will be able to create content and a site map that gives them what they want. That means happier visitors, and smoother customer relations. By creating content based upon keyword research, you can position your site to win for a wide range of specific keyword phrases.
To find out how people are searching the Web, go to Overture.com and use the Keyword Suggestion Tool and type in all the keywords you can. Go to your competitors' websites and see what keywords they are using. Type those keywords into the Overture tool. Get out a thesaurus and find more keywords. Type those keywords into the Overture tool. Pretty soon you'll have a rank-ordered list of thousands and thousands of keyword phrases related to your products and services. Group those into families, and create content around the families.
As an example, look at the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool for the word "software" in the month of April.
The top 10 searches including the word software are:
1159532 software
219780 free software
82023 software crack
76208 computer software
57840 dvd software
57049 free software download
41540 tax software
38977 help desk software
38305 software driver
37725 palm software
If you were designing an online software retail site, it would make sense to create sections of the site specifically for: free software; dvd software; tax software; help desk software; and palm software. That's a 30 second example to illustrate a point. You need to dig much deeper.
By creating a site map based upon the known searching behavior of your potential customers, you are increasing the usability of your site. You are "speaking their language," so to speak. You are also setting yourself up to win a wide variety of very specific searches.
When redesigning a website, it is critical that you preserve whatever search engine listings you have already achieved. Starting over with a new design and content doesn't have to mean losing the indexing you already have. There are two important considerations, files indexed by the search engines, and files which have links pointing to them from other sites and directories.
First, you need to take special care to preserve the filenames of pages on your site that are already indexed by Google, AltaVista, Alltheweb, Teoma, and Inktomi. The most important files to preserve are the files which Google has already indexed.
Go to Google and search for "domainname site:www.domainname.com" to see almost all the pages on your site which have been indexed. For us, that would be "seologic site:www.seologic.com". Replace domainname and www.domainname.com with your site's information.
When you redesign your site, it is important that you preserve the file structure to the extent that you can to preserve listings. I.e., if a page has been indexed, keep that page - either put some new content on it, or just update the content and design. It will dramatically speed up the process of getting your new content indexed, and it will eliminate the problem of people finding dead pages on the search engines when they search for your site. If you are changing file types (for example, changing from HTML to PHP), or are set on changing the file structure, then read, "Will changing our URL affect our search engine rankings? How can we change urls without losing the traffic we're already getting?".
Second, if other websites have linked to specific pages on your site, do everything within reason to preserve those addresses on your site. You can use the search engines to find Web pages which have linked to your site, then visit those pages to see specifically which pages on your site are involved.
On Google, you can find websites that have linked to your site by searching for "link:www.domainname.com." Replace www.domainname.com with your domain name.
