SEO during a website redesign process is crucial. Too often decision makers are more worried about how pretty the new site will look and get attracted to the flashy objects. Or they saw something on another site that looked cool, but they don’t realize that it is either an i-frame or jquery, so they don’t understand the SEO downfalls to those items. If you are considering a redesign of your website, or even the begininning of a whole new design, SEO should be in the initial discussions. If you have an in-house SEO or you are working with an SEO consultant, you should involve them in phase 1. There is nothing worse than finishing your site and then giving to the SEO team and asking them to give recommendations. A lot of the time, they are going to find issues with the design and development work that was just completed. This is when an SEO becomes a developer’s nightmare.
When dealing with the development side of things, the executives you are working with may not fully understand how an i-frame works. An SEO-er would tell you that there is no SEO value from the content that is within that i-frame so you should lose it and let the content live on that page with plain html text. Once again, if the site was developed before the SEO team could give suggestions, you have just created double the work. Same goes when using jQuery. The links that are inside of the script are not visible to the search engines, so they will not see all of your internal linking structure that your SEO consultant has put together for you. Again, another waste of money or waste of effort by having to go back and do it again.
We haven’t even gotten to the site architecture yet. Many small businesses may not have a strategist on their team to plan out an entire site architecture. What this planning phase does, and something that any SEO consultant should be able to do, is maps out each level of your site. Knowing that any one page should not be more than 3 clicks from the homepage, an SEO-er can help plan the site out easier. Once again, if the designer and developer have not even spoken to the SEO team beforehand, they may not know this.
Save yourself time and money by taking into consideration the importance of SEO during a website redesign process.