Generate Traffic, Leads and Sales With Video
If you don’t keep up with the latest design trends your blog may begin losing traffic. If you designed it several years ago it may have lost its appeal to your visitors and now needs an overhaul. Even if you don’t want to invest time and effort consider optimizing it for maximum performance.
7 Signs Your Blog Needs To Be Redesigned
Your website has been online for a number of years but as you surf the net you realize your design looks out of date, is not cutting edge, uninspiring and lacks interactivity. The longer you put it off the worse you feel because you are not keeping up with your competitors who have great looking websites and are outranking you in the search engines.
5 signs your website needs a redesign
The cost to redesign a website depends on who is asking the question. For example a solo website owner may expect to pay a few hundred dollars for a redesign, whereas a corporation with many employees may expect to pay a few thousand dollars. I run a small web design company which primarily targets small business owners so my prices are in line with most of my clients’ budgets.
Problems conveying design costs
An old Web design can be compared to an old house. It’s lost its luster, it’s in a state of disrepair, and no longer looks attractive . The current design of your website may be the same. It may look outdated, unattractive and in need of a makeover.
Top 7 reasons to redesign your website
1. Outdated design
Perhaps your current design is several years old. You may have designed it yourself or had it designed by someone else who didn’t know what they were doing. Whatever the reason it’s time to get a new design so you can give your business a fresh look that will attract and retain your visitors. Your website is the first impression a visitor receives of your business so their experience should be a pleasant one.
2. Difficult to navigate
Website visitors should be able to navigate your web pages to find information quickly and easily. For example you may have navigation links at the top but not at the bottom of your pages. When someone reaches the bottom of your page they will need to scroll to the top to navigate to other sections of your website. To solve this problem include navigation links at the bottom of your web pages and links to internal pages within your content.
3. Code errors
If your website contains many HTML or XHTML errors it will be difficult for the search engines to spider your pages plus it will take them longer to load. When redesigning your website make sure your web pages validate correctly.
4. Slow loading pages
Website loading speed is now one of the ranking factors for Google. This makes sense because people want to access information quickly with their high-speed Internet connections. Your site should load within a few seconds. Slow loading pages are often caused by large images, videos, javascript, code errors, broken links or a slow server.
5. Pages are not search engine friendly
If your website is not optimized for the search engines you’re losing lots of traffic. To optimize your web pages your main keywords should be included in the title, description and keyword meta tags. They should also be included in your headings, subheadings, main content, links, file names and image descriptions (alt tag).
6. Lack of accessibility
Most websites on the net are not accessible to people who are vision impaired. They may be blind, colorblind or have difficulty reading small text on the screen. It may cost you more to make your website accessible to all people however it will expand your audience.
7. Sloppy web copy
If your Web copy does not inspire your visitors to take action you may have to rewrite it. You can do this yourself or hire a professional copywriter who can hypnotize your visitors with words that will get them to take action.
Hire a professional web designer to redesign your website. Make sure he or she has many years of experience so you will not only get a great design but receive help in marketing the site to make it profitable.
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Top 7 Reasons to Get Your Web Pages Redesigned
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Get a Professional WordPress Website designed for your
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Is your website looking a little stale and not performing well for you?
Do you want it to look more professional?
If so, it’s time to redesign your website so it will clearly reflect your business image, attract more visitors and generate more sales.
Let’s look at the top 7 reasons to redesign your website
1. Out of date design
If your website was designed several years ago it probably has an old design that no longer appeals to your visitors (or yourself). Even if you get lots of visitors they are not purchasing your products or services. Your website should provide the best experience for first time visitors so they’ll want to do business with you.
2. Out of date content
If the content no longer grabs your visitor’s attention you need to rewrite it. Why not redesign your website while you rewrite the content so your design will harmonize or enhance it.
3. Ineffective navigation
If your visitors can’t quickly and easily access the information they’ll go to your competitor’s site. Your information should be within 3 clicks from the home page. Old navigation menus use images which search engines can’t index. Convert your pages over to a CSS (cascading style sheets) navigation system. It loads fast and is search engine friendly.
4. Slow loading web pages
Google has added loading speed as a rankling factor for the search engines. If your website doesn’t load fast you may not only lose rankings but lose impatient visitors. Some of the factors that affect load times include:
5. Not optimized for the search engines
Your web designer may not have designed your web pages to be search engine friendly so they won’t attract much traffic. Many web designers know how to design a website but are not familiar with promotion strategies. When redesigning your website be sure to select a web designer that knows about search engine marketing.
6. Converting static website to content management system (CMS)
If your static html website contains hundreds of pages that need updating you’ll have to edit them one at a time unless you use server side includes files. Many site owners are now using content management system because of these features:
Two popular CMS editors are WordPress and Joomla. Both are open source and freely available
7. Creating an interactive website
Most static html websites are not built for interaction with your visitors. For example with a CMS such as a blog the visitor can leave comments, subscribe to RSS feeds, create multiple editors to add content, plus a blog automatically alerts the search engines of new content.
If your current website fits any these criteria consider a redesign. You’ll have the opportunity to create an up to date professional design that is search engine friendly, fast loading and attracts more visitors and sales.
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Get a professional website design or redesign
for your online business by visiting:
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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com
Before you make plans to redesign your website there are some seo secrets you need to know about that generate long term benefits. Many site owners SEO their websites after they’ve been redesigned because they didn’t receive any extra traffic or their traffic disappeared. Follow the SEO secrets below so your web site will easily be found by the search engines.
6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know
At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.
Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.
Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!
1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture
Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.
Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.
In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.
2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content
When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.
Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.
For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.
3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS
If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.
Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.
This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.
4. Coding of Navigation Menus
Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.
Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.
5. Custom HTML Elements
While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.
Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.
6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links
It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.
You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.
Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.
Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!
While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.
Source
6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know
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