Web Design Tip #2 of 7: Safeguard Your Website Assets
This is post #2 in a 7-part series on how to make leverage your web design project to produce lasting results. Although produced for our clients in the greater Reading, PA and surrounding areas (Philadelphia, Lancaster, York, Allentown, and Harrisburg), these web design principles apply everywhere.
Carefully Preserve Your Website Assets
It is easy to do more harm than good in a web redesign project if existing assets are not carefully preserved during the conversion process. Assets include content, inbound links from other websites, keyword rankings, and features that move prospects, leads, and customers through the sales process.
Website Asset Checklist
To preserve your web presence and your search engine rankings, you must carefully list and monitor these assets to insure that they are properly transferred in the redesign process. Use this handy checklist to insure nothing is missed:
- PAGE LIST: List each page on the current website
- FLAG PAGES: Flag the most popular and most effective pages and features on those pages for greater scrutiny in the conversion process
- LINK LIST: List each incoming link, the linking website, and the page linked to on your site
- FLAG LINKS: Flag the most important incoming links in terms of SEO strength and actual traffic driven from the linking site, and sales from those links
- KEYWORD RANK LIST: Determine which keywords you rank for on the current website, and how you rank (Google page 1, 2, etc.)
- KEYWORD TRAFFIC LIST: Determine which keywords drive the most traffic and sales
- HIGH-TO-LOW LISTS: Rank the items on each list above from high to low, with the goal of placing greater emphasis on the more valuable pages, links, and keywords
- REDIRECT LIST: Add a project deliverable for all valuable links to be redirected to the proper page on the new website
Assembling the Right Team
If your web development team does not fully understand the importance and methodology of preserving search engine optimization, or if you lack the ability to track the above statistics on your current site, then it may be best to hire a specialist to track your statistics and to perform the redesign to ensure that your web presence is preserved.
To download our free white paper, Website Design: 7 Ways to Make it Pay , click the image below.
