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The website is an essential part of representing your business online. The trend and taste of the people changes with time so to keep up with the latest trend and expectations it is necessary to redesign your website from time to time.

But redesigning a website can be a difficult task as while redesigning certain SEO friendly content or tags may unknowingly get deleted or changed. This can result in your website not showing in the search engine results and can make your business suffer losses. So, if you are thinking about redesigning your website there are certain mistakes that you should avoid so as to not to destroy SEO friendly content of your website.

In this article, you will find all about the common mistakes that web designers do that destroy the SEO of a website.

Delete pages or changing page URLs

There are many unwanted pages that web designers delete during the redesigning process. Remaining pages may be renamed or moved which changes the URL of these pages. An inexperienced web designer will simply delete or change the URLs of the page and consider his or her task complete.

But this is the biggest mistake that they are doing as the pages which got deleted may have ranked well or had some inbound links directing to them or it may have been bookmarked by some users. So, if anybody clicks on that bookmark or link, they will encounter an error message or 404 pages not found. This can result in a negative visitor experience and can drive the traffic away from your website.

Therefore, care must be taken before deleting the pages. The best way is to redirect them to any other page that is relevant enough. You can also direct the old URL of the pages which are being changed or moved to new ones. Doing this will ensure that your SEO friendly pages will be there but it will inform the search engine that those pages are permanently moved to a new location.    

Meta Tags

Meta tags are text snippets that describe the content of your website page. These meta tags are not visible on your page and you can only find them by right-clicking and then clicking of the view page source. In simplest of terms these meta tags can be called content descriptors for the search engines.

There are some meta tags like title tag, meta description tag that is very important from the perspective of SEO. These tags are responsible for telling the search engine what the title of your website is and what your website is about. So, changing or deleting them will completely change the way your website shows up in search engine searches. Therefore, it is important for the designers to give proper consideration to these meta tags while redesigning.    

Navigation

Website navigation is another thing that should be redesigned properly as it also plays an important role in SEO. Website navigation is nothing but the internal links that connect different pages of your website. Properly categorized and easy to navigate website will not only make your visitors happy but also will provide greater visibility for your website in the search engines.

The one thing that should be kept in mind is that don’t make your website too much complicated to navigate, as the complicated websites will irritate the users which will decrease your traffic.

H1, H2 & H3 Tags

One common mistake that many designers do while redesigning a website is not utilizing H1, H2 & H3 header tags properly. These tags are important to optimize and utilize as they can help your website in increasing its ranking in the search engine. For on-page SEO header tags are the most important things as the search engine uses them to communicate with your website.

For effective SEO utilization of these header tags in h1 use a keyword that is relevant to your website content and related to the title of your page. H2 then acts as the subheading for h1 should contain the keyword which you have used in h1. H3 is then the subheading for h2. Do not keep stuffing them with keywords otherwise, it will become useless.  

Content

Website content should also be written in such a way that it should be SEO friendly. The content of your website should be stuffed with popular keywords related to your business or products. While redesigning care should be taken to organize the content of the website logically. Organizing the content of your website logically and properly is not only good from the SEO perspective but also for your website visitors.

While writing the content for your website keyword optimization is also necessary for better searchability. You should know where and how you can use a keyword so that it can provide maximum results.  

Schema Code

Adding a schema code to your website improves the way your website page is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). This code adds rich snippets that are visible in the SERPs below the title of your website page.

This code adds additional details that are available on your website page to the search engine results. You can understand its process by this example; if you are selling a book then along with the title of the book it will also show author name, price, ratings, etc in SERPs if anybody searches for that title of the book. This can make things easy for the customers as they can easily look for the best prices at SERPs only and will also improve the ranking of your website.

Internal Links

They are the hyperlinks that point to different pages of your website. The search engine uses these internal links to crawl through your website and list its pages in their keyword indices. But many of the website designers make the mistake of burying or hiding the link navigation in such a way that it becomes impossible for the search engines to access them.

Suppose, there are 5 pages on your website, the search engine reaches the first page and finds the internal links of third and fifth pages. But it is unable to find the second and fourth pages even though they are on your website. So, according to search engines, these pages don’t exist even if you have optimized and trending keywords in those pages. Therefore, internal link management is one of the most important points in terms of SEO in website redesigning.   

Image alt text

Alternative texts or alt text are used to describe the function and appearance of an image on the website page. These texts are used to represent the images in a text format so that the search engine can recognize their purpose easily. As this alt text gives you yet another chance to include your keyword, therefore, it can be beneficial in terms of SEO.

Since the search engines are unable to see the images as humans do therefore it is possible for them to misinterpret the image. And the misinterpreted image can result in a lowering of the ranking of your website or not ranked at all. Therefore, be sure to include these alt texts with your images in the HTML code. Since you can enter your keywords in it, it will certainly improve the ranking of your page and the overall ranking of your website.

Image Path

While redesigning the websites the path of all the images used in the old websites should be corrected to redirect to the new ones. If it is not done properly the images in the redesigned website will fail to load which can impact the SEO prospective of the websites.  

Images should also be compressed and rescaled so that the load time of the redesigned website becomes faster. The images play an important role in attracting potential customers or users to the websites so it is important to check whether all the images have the correct path or not. The image load time will also affect the load time of the website so customized images are a must on a website for faster load time.

Robots.txt

Website designers should take care while writing robots.txt file since it is the file that tells the search engine crawlers to crawl through the pages which is specified in it. By issuing a disallow command in robots.txt website designers can block search engines from accessing any section of the website. Since the search engines cache the contents of robots.txt and updates it every day, therefore, it is always good to make sure that the content or data which you want to be indexed by search engines are not blocked by it.  

In order to get an SEO friendly website, it is important for the website designer to take of the points that are mentioned in this article. By taking them into consideration website designers can redesign any website completely SEO friendly and it will also attract positive reviews from the users or visitors of the website.