SEO 101

Website Redesign and XML Sitemaps

Learn about the impact that can be made when you are redesigning your website and they reference RexSwain.com for some cool tools. Plus, they discuss how to go about with setting up an xml sitemap. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 37m
Broadcast on:: 27 Jul 2009
Audio Format:: other

Learn about the impact that can be made when you are redesigning your website and they reference RexSwain.com for some cool tools. Plus, they discuss how to go about with setting up an xml sitemap.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hear that? That's the sound of someone trying to steal your crypto. Every day, thousands of hackers online are doing the same. That's why Oculus uses air-gapped cold storage technology to protect your assets. Using our keycard and wallet app to form a protective barrier, Oculus insulates you from hackers and puts control of your digital assets back in your hands. Order the first truly air-gapped crypto wallet at getarculus.com. The opinions expressed on this webmaster radio.fm program are those of the host, guest, and callers. And do not reflect those of the staff, management, or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse, and get ready to get back to the basis. SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello, and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. And my co-host is John Carca, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. So John, big plans for the weekend? I'm looking at a house. I might be moving one of these days soon. So I'm going to go look at the house this weekend. Nice little place on the water, 35 foot of dock space. Excited about it. Man, all right, you live on an island. What are you complaining about? Yeah, it's still running on the water. 35 feet of dock space sounds pretty sweet. Well, I'll just wait. OK, well, today's show. What do you do about a redesign? A lot of people have the problem, where they're about to redesign their website, or they're about to launch it for that matter. And they haven't even thought of what that's going to matter, how that's going to impact their search engine rankings. And I know John and I are always dealing with this. Always. Always. Yeah, and it's not just that. It's also people who are launching sites and what that involves and all that sort of stuff. So I'd like to touch on both if we can today. Let's focus first on redesign them. So John, what's the first thing that comes to mind for you? When people are redesigning a site, the first thing that I always think about right off the bat is how are they going to move from their old site to their new site? And is this redesign going to affect their architecture? So if they're just re-skinning a site, just putting a new skin on it, it's not as big a deal. But if they're changing content management systems, or changing their URL structure and application structure, it becomes a much more delicate issue to make that change. That's the first thing that I ask is, are you changing those URLs? Oh, big time. And even if they are going to switch, they also have to keep in mind, it's one thing. Are they going to be switching? Another thing is they may not be switching, but they may be changing in some ways. I've had this happen before. They said they weren't changing the URLs. And I guess technically they didn't in their mind, but they did, the capitalization was different. Right, that is officially a change in URL. Yeah, and I have to tell them, I say, look, I know that you're not changing any URLs, but you're switching from PHP to ASP. So all URLs are the same, but your file extension changed. That's a change. And I tell them out front, I say, if you change any one character in your URL, the engine's going to see it as a new URL. So one character change anywhere in the URL from the HTTP, if you change it to HTTPS, that's a change. If you change it from HTML to HTML file, that's a new URL. So one character is all it takes. And the capitalization, like Ross said, is another one. You don't even have to change the characters. Yeah, it's funny, I was just thinking about HTML. I don't know what you, but that's always bothered me. Why didn't they just make HTML and HTML just the same? Yeah. I'd like to blame Microsoft for this one, but I don't think I can. Anyway, just a little rant. I just don't understand it. The stuff like that just doesn't make any sense to me. But yeah, I think that it's critical for people to look at their site before and plan every single step. And it's not to do their own horn, but having a web marketer or someone that is familiar with web marketing has done a transition before to talk to you is critical, too, because they can walk you through different steps. For example, if you were about to switch from said website on your own little server and you're about to move to a redesign on, say, the Yahoo sites, what's it called? Or actually, that's not a good example. Yahoo to Yahoo. Let's say you're going to Yahoo servers. You go to Yahoo shopping cart and you're about to switch to another one. Or you're even moving away from Yahoo, for that matter. I had someone do this recently, and that is a nightmare beyond belief, because Yahoo does not allow 301 redirects. Can you move it? And that's a good point, right? We talked about that the URL changes a big issue, but we didn't really say why. So the reason that it's such a big issue is because Google has built up history and weight and relevancy to this page. And if you change it to a new page, you've lost all that, and you're starting from scratch. And when we say new page, it's HTML to HTML is a new page. So if you just add that L on the end of your URL, you've lost all that history in Google. You've lost all that weight. You've lost those rankings. And you're starting brand new from a new page. Unless, like Ross just mentioned, you do those redirects. You implement a transition strategy so the engines know what the old pages are. And they're redirected properly to the new pages. And one of the examples-- I was actually at the SMX Avast recently. And someone was saying they had a site that was so massive. There was just no way they could do 301s to everything. And they were changing the URL, so it wasn't like they could just do a mass redirect. The fact is they had to choose to only redirect the most important pages, the ones that were actually getting traffic. And really, when it comes down to it, that's really all that matters anyway. These are the ones that get traffic, make sure they're redirected. But in an ideal world, you would love to be able to redirect everything, but that can't happen all the time. And if you run across that situation, one of the things I've done in the past-- and you're right, Ross, that's pretty common-- is if you have access to your webmaster tools, you can log in there and really see which pages are indexed by the engines and which ones aren't. So if you have 10,000 pages on your site and Google's only indexing 1,000 of them, you don't have to worry about doing a redex from the other 9,000 because they're not even indexing them anyway. So webmaster tools is a good place to go and look and see what's really important to do that transition and those redirects on. Well, what would you say is the next point? I guess the next thing to think about is when you redesign a site, transition is important. You brought up a good point. It's all the links that you're building to your site. So you've got all these links pointing to these-- hopefully, you have a bunch of internal links pointing to your site. The 301 redirect, once you implement it in the transition strategy, will take care of most of that. But those 301 redirects will transfer the information about the engines for so long. But if you have really good links pointing to some of those internal pages, it really would benefit you if it's possible to reach out to the people that have built those links, if at all possible, through your links from social media or something, to change them so that you don't have to rely on that 301 redirect. Again, just like with the pages, you're not going to be able to do every once. You want to really target the most important, the best links you have built to those internal pages. That's going to help, I think, quite a bit as well. Yeah, and the other thing, too, is there's only so long you'd want to have a 301 redirect up, I guess. I mean, in an ideal world, you'll get them up forever. But you start moving around, say, you've been online for 10 plus years. Likely you've moved servers here and there. You've got quite a pile up of 301 redirects. I don't know. Have you ever seen a max? Have you ever seen it actually slowing down? I actually had to tell people-- and I wish I could find the source that I got this from originally. But if you do more than two redirects in the chain, you're going to affect how well the redirects pass relevancy. So if you do a redirect and then another redirect, so you've got three pages in the thing, you're going to be OK. But if you had another one on top of that, you're starting to hurt your ability to pass on those ranks. So two, to me, would be the max that you want. Yeah, and also, I've noticed that Google Webmaster Tools will actually warn you of that, too. So if you just signed into your Google Webmaster Tools, what I like-- Google Webmaster Tools will actually say this. We're being redirected to all of that. I can't remember the exact phrases they're using. And that's a good indicator that, oh, better go update this. Definitely. And you've got to be careful, too, because if a lot of these content management systems, the new ones that you add, or even just developers that have built your site from scratch, I've seen them many times. I've seen a web developer. And I don't think they do have a purpose. I'm not sure how it happens. But let's say there's a redirect when you type in a URL. They'll do a 301, more often not a 302. But they should do a 301 redirect. They'll do a redirect immediately that adds a backslash to the end of your query, if it's not a .html page. So if you type in domain.com/directory, it'll do a redirect and add a backslash at the end of that. Well, if you've got another redirect on top of that to a new page you've already maxed out of your two redirects, whether you knew it or not. So you've got to be really careful about that. There's a tool I use out there called rexwayne.com. And you've got a bunch of tools. But there's one, if you go to a site, rexwayne.com, but halfway down is a list of tools. It's called an HTTP viewer. And what that does is it'll show you exactly what the server sends back and forth to the browser. And it will follow a redirect chain. It'll tell you, here's your initial request, the URL you requested. Here's the first redirect to add the backslash. Here's the second redirect to add www. Here's the third redirect to go to your page that you wanted to go to. And if there's 10 redirects, it'll step you through everyone. It'll tell you exactly what type of 301, 302, 305. And it's a great tool to really analyze your redirect structure. Yeah, I was just checking out rexwayne. I've never heard of that before. So thank you. You got my own little tip there today. It's got lots of great little tools there, doesn't it? Yeah, he's been around for a lot of time. But he's more on the techie side of things. He's not a real end of the SEO style. He's mostly for programmers and people dealing with server issues. But we can use it too. The Black Arts is programming. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to discuss more on how to design your website to make sure here. Keep your rankings. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, this is Danny Sullivan. To talk to you about the Bruce Clay Incorporated, they've made ink magazines list of growing private businesses and have exhibited and sponsored on my conferences since the very beginning. You've seen their search engine relationship chart or you've read their SEO code of ethics, so you know they're SEO experts. But did you know they can help you with PBC web analytics, web design, marketing strategy, promotion and branding? Yep, get everything you need for success in the online marketplace. You can check it out from the professionals at Bruce Clay Incorporated. For over 10 years with offices worldwide, they've got the answers you need. Check them out today at bruceclay.com. Hey, have you got the number for Jerry's Pizza? Look it up on localpages.com. Localpages.com, what if I wanted a business number in Miami? Localpages.com. Can people find your business online? Be seen with localpages.com on every local listing in all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ask. With over 6 billion quality searches a month and bid starting as low as one set get connected with local consumers at the exact moment that they're looking for you. San Francisco, Green Bay, London. I told you, localpages.com. List your business on localpages.com. Now, get $100 in free local advertising. Localpages.com. Bringing your neighborhood to you. Here's your bill. Thank you so much, guys. Hey, it's all right. I'll take care of the tab, Jason. Well, thanks, Dave. How are you doing so well these days? It seems everyone's in a pinch for cash. Revenuewire.com, that's a revenue wire. Yeah, revenuewire.com is an all-in-one platform offering affiliates high-demand software from top-notch PC utility merchants. With 75% commissions, twice-monthly payouts, incredibly accurate analytics tools, revenue wires make any more money today than I did in the last few years put together, even in this economy, especially in this economy. Revenuewire has a ton of great products to meet the demand. I'm telling you, this network is recession-proof. Revenuewire. The recession-proof network platform. For more information, visit revenuewire.com today. That's revenuewire.com. Affiliate marketing is changing rapidly. Stay ahead of the trends with affiliate marketing insider. Thursdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific, or on demand anytime inside the affiliate marketing channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. OK, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carca, SEO Manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. For the break, we're discussing redesigns, and rexwayne.com, which is a great little site for some very cool tools, more program-oriented, and I guess more on the advanced end of SEO, but there's some neat stuff there. I learned a little something new there myself. Now, shouldn't the break John and I were talking about what to come up next, and really what really stuck out for us was the site map. Now, the XML site map is used. It's something you can submit to the search engines, and when the search engines see it, it's like a suggestion box. These are the pages I'd like you, the search engine, to index on my site, and you can actually prioritize whatever you'd like of which pages are more important, which ones are updated more often. Like I said, it's a suggestion box, Google and the guys don't exactly follow this to the T, but it's there. Well, this site map is a fantastic tool when you're doing a redesign, because when you're about to launch, or let's say you've launched, you've got a copy of the old site map. You've got to keep that on file, because what you're going to do is you're going to submit the old site map to Google. Doesn't matter if it's already been there before, you submit it, and what's going to happen is Google's going to go to the site map and follow all the old links, hit all the new redirects, those redirects that you set up will now be forwarded to the new page or the new site. And once you start seeing your new URLs showing up within Google, you then go back and switch out and put in the new site map. And it's a faster way of propagating a new site navigation scheme. Did I miss anything there, John? One thing I'd add is before you go ahead and just swap the two out, I would actually include both sets of URLs in the same site map for a short time, giving the new URLs the higher priority than the old URLs. That way it kind of reinforces that redirection to make sure everything's getting crawled, and then you drop out, leave that for a week or two, and then you drop out the old URLs. Now, why would you do that? I'm just curious. Is it just semantics? Do you think it really makes a big difference to in a swap? It's just the way I've done it. So I couldn't tell you if it just seems to work well for me that way. I haven't tried it with just going cold turkey from one to the other. If you have in a works, then great. I think you could do it either way. I just added that one extra step, just as a little bit of reinforcement in my mind. Yeah, well, certainly it sounds to me like you, what you're saying with what to be just as effective. I know mine has worked for me, so I was just curious whether or not there's something I might be missing. The Everwise John, I must always ask. Nice, but that does be a good point. Not the Everwise part, but the actual timing part of this whole transition strategy. I get that as a lot is, well, when I do this, how long is it going to take for the engines to see my new site, URLs, and get rid of my old ones? That's one of those questions that has a floating answer. It really is based on how often to do the sites come and spider your site, how often does the crawler hit you up? Does the deep crawl come frequently or does it come once a quarter? Usually, you can expect the transition to fully take place after you've been hit by the deep crawl. If you recite that the deep crawl comes once a month, the transition will probably take about a month, depending on when you are in that cycle between crawls. If it only comes once a quarter, then you've got a little while to wait. Yeah, and that can be particularly painful for some clients, especially when they, I don't know about you, but I do know everyone in our industry has this problem. There's some clients that just expect this is going to happen overnight, and no matter what we say, it doesn't matter, they're not happy. But the fact is, we can't control search engines, I wish we could, we can't. Yeah. And so that waiting game is just part of the transfer of a new site, and that's why it's not to be taken lightly. Without a doubt. And you definitely don't want to wait until the last minute to do this. People will call me and say, "I'm going to lunch on my site next week. Can you check it out for me?" I'm like, "I can, but if you really expect the lunch next week, you've got a lot of work to do between now and then. Plan for this ahead of time." Yeah, and you'll find yourself probably a few weeks late, but you know what? It's going to be well worth it. The fact that you can easily lose all, if not some of your major rankings from doing a poor move is enough to wake a lot of people up. Another thing that occurred to me, too, was into the in-depth stuff. But you know, when you're redesigning, consider what you've learned. I'm assuming that in your old website, you took the time to use website analytics to learn from your traffic, and you've honed your website around what you've learned. So let's say you found out that by having a logo of your shipping policy on a given conversion page, improved your traffic or improved your conversions. Well, when you're creating the new site, take those lessons and apply them to the new site. Don't rush through it. Make sure everything is tested and tested and tested before you launch it. Go through and remember, "Oh, right, no, we forgot this. We forgot this." That will dramatically reduce any kind of dips and conversions. And you know, there's a reason you'll learn this stuff. You want to keep applying it for later days. Let it out, definitely. Now, navigation structure was one I think that, John, you were mentioning a moment ago. Yeah, that's true. If you're doing this redesign and you've got all your transition to your pages, you nailed down that, you've got all your redirects done, you've got your XML, a sitemap file done, and everything seems to go in perfect. But you're still losing some rankings on some of your key terms. Something to look at is if you changed your navigation structure, and let's say your old navigation structure was built with one of those drop-down lists and it had widgets and then you had blue, red, green, blue, blue, green underneath it, and you had those keywords in your navigation. And your new navigation is more, let's say it's a silent navigation, where you have widgets and you have secondary navigation. So you've changed the way your navigation structure works and where those keywords are. That can affect the internal linking structure of your site that's created by your internal navigation, can affect your rankings. So there's not really much you can do from transitioning from site to site. That's more of an issue of when you're creating your new design. When you're building out the new look and feel for your site, you're improving your site, definitely. But remember, when you're looking at that improvement, that your internal navigation, your internal linking structure is one of the key factors from your link building that help you rank for your keywords. If you change that too much from the anchor text standpoint, which words are linking to which pages, that's going to affect the existing rankings when you do your redesign. And another thing is when I recently worked on a very popular site that had to do a transition, and they were understandably nervous, and when I was consulting, I said, "Look, if you're that nervous about it, change the design, change some of the layouts of the navigation and stuff, stick to the same keywords, stick to the same body text." I mean, this is really paranoid, but if you do that, if you stick to the same content generally and you're only changing the skin of the site, do that transition. Yeah, there is some navigational changes in terms of where they're located on the page, that kind of stuff, just a look, really. Then your chances of any having any kind of dip in rankings, for at least for any period of time, is very low. And once the site has finished the transition, any transition you do see, it's going to be minimal, first of all. You're not going to see much of a dip. Then you can start applying other changes such as new content. The key is not to pile up too many changes at once, because then it's too difficult to figure out what it is that you did that may have sabotaged up to get a ranking. Exactly. There's nothing worse than having so many that you're like, "Oh, no, what was it?" Exactly. But I will say that Ross, every time I've ever worked with someone on a relaunch of a redesign site, there's always a loss in rankings. How big of a change will determine how big the loss is, but there's always some kind of loss in rankings for certain terms. And we keep going back to this with that transition strategy that you use to migrate from the old site to the new site, is really the better you do that transition, the faster those rankings will come back. Okay, we're going to take a quick break right now. When we come back, we're going to touch on designing a new site. There's a few things I'd really like to pass along, a little Ross wisdom, if you will. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Friendfinder Friendfinder The world's largest online dating network featuring over 100 million profiles at hot sites such as passion.com and fastcubit.com represents enormous profit-making opportunities for webmasters just like you. With Friendfinder's ability to geo-target and provide billing solutions and in most languages and currencies, you are sure to find our comprehensive network to be a good friend. Get more traffic maximizing details now at friendfinder.com Are you happy with your landing page performance? Discover how to improve your landing page performance with conversioncredit.com brought to you by Engine Ready. Turn your underperforming landing pages into cost-effective sales-producing machines. Be sure you're not wasting your precious PPC budget. Conversion credit tools give you the ingredients to create high converting landing pages. You don't have to be an expert to use Engine Ready's conversion credit tools, but you'll feel like a landing page pro. Take the guesswork out of increasing your conversion rate. Visit conversioncredit.com and boost your conversion rate for free. That's www.conversioncredit.com Does your website need a bailout? Looking for a conversion rate stimulus package? Do you need a website improvement to do list? On-target, a subscription service from FutureNow and Brian Eisenberg monitors your website 24/7 analyzing the actions of every potential customer. It gives you a to-do list. It tells you exactly what to fix and how to fix it so that more of your visitors do what you need them to do. On-target pricing starts at $1,000 a month. See more at www.futurenowinc.com/ontarget I'm Brian Eisenberg and I approve this message. Ready to learn to be a mass marketing mastermind? Take some notes from the Godfathers of mass distribution. Inbox, Wednesdays at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific or on demand anytime inside the Internet Marketing Channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carcut, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. For the break, we were discussing, well, essentially the fact that no matter what you do and during a redesign, you're going to get a little bit, or at the very least, a little bit of ranking drop. We both, John and I have always seen something drop in terms of rankings. You can minimize it, but no matter what, you're going to see some. So expect that and don't take it lightly. Okay, and the better your transition strategy, the quicker your rankings will come back. Yes, and now the Ross wisdom that John couldn't help but laugh at. Well, what I'd like to touch on is web design. These days, I've been kind of pushed into it by my business coach, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I'm helping clients figure out how to design a website, but plan it before they design it and then help them find the right vendor, help make sure that the product's done perfectly so that by the time it launches, it's not just launched and then web marketing is about to be done on the site. But when it launches, it launches, all the web marketing turns on, all that stuff turns on. You've already got a web marketing plan, everything gets a go. Extremely rare. I don't know how often do you see that, John? Maybe in the biggest companies? Oh, no, definitely not in the biggest companies. It's, yeah. Believe me, I've had this conversation with plenty and what I always tell people is, and I think it's twice directly what you're talking about, Ross, is SEO is not something you do to a site. And when you're thinking about creating a site or redesigning a site, SEO should be the forefront of what in your mind from the very, very beginning. You do it from the day you conceive the site to the day you turn it off. Totally great. And you know what? It's not rocket science. It really isn't. And there's so much out there to learn to read about on SEO. And if you just got the basics down and consider that when you're doing the design, that would be fast, a vast improvement on rankings. So what I've been doing is, and this is what I suggest, if you're going to build a website, first sit down with someone, someone who can help you think outside of the bottle, because frankly, when you're inside the bottle, you can't read the label. You're too close to what you're working on. And you get a web marketer in, you get someone that you trust, anyone like that to come in and help you walk through what it is that you expect from your website. What should your goals be? And then, what kind of budget you're going to have once the site goes? You should know all this. Once you know what the budget is, then you can build a web marketing strategy around that. Then, once you know what the web marketing strategy is, you can start to plan out the actual structure of the site. Yes, we have not touched the structure. After all of that, then you touch the structure. And that includes looking at the optimization, how it's going to be built into the site. But also, you know you're going to have no money for social media. You know you're going to have this and that. Okay, great. Now, you can build social media into the structure of the site as well. And you can consider the technologies that are going to be required to build that site. Without doing all this, nine times out of 10, I'm getting sites sent to me that are begging to be redesigned again because it's so sad because the clients are excited. They've spent a lot of money. But when that site comes to me, I have to tell them we can't market this. Or we can market it, but you're just not going to get the best effect. Everything is just so sad. Do you want to hear a horror story, Russ? Please. I've dealt with a client a few years ago. This guy is like a big time marketing guy out in California. He goes to the ad tech and all those. People follow him around like they follow back cuts in our industry, right? So he had this site and he wanted a really unique site. And he hired this really cutting edge design firm. And they built in this site that was just to him. It was the most amazing website he'd ever seen. He did that all without thinking about SEO first. Then he thought afterwards, okay, now I need to get search engine likes. And so I looked at the site. I did audit of the site and I came back to him. We did the cover that the call to talk about what I found on his audit. And he was all excited. He told me, yeah, I like this site so much. I bought the design firm that built it and literally. He literally spent including buying this design firm a million dollars on this website. The first thing I told him was, well, you're going to have to start from scratch. This site will never rank for anything because this design firm was very cutting edge. It did all kinds of great stuff from the design perspective. Every single page of the site was a different design. There was no navigation that was consistent to the whole site. And every single page of the site, when he went to it, if he had this big thing pop up, blocking everything that was like this cowboy guy with a sign to make you sign up for the site that was all JavaScript based. It was just totally, it was a beautiful site. Don't get me wrong. It was beautiful. But it was completely, completely never going to rank for a single keyword ever. And he blew his top, not me, but the design firm mostly because I guess they had him convinced that it would rank. But thank God he trusted you because otherwise he's the target of that. Oh, but then, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, he was not a happy man. But if he would have brought us in, if he would have brought us in at the beginning, we could have worked with the design firm. We could have helped them understand what's going to work and what's not going to work for search. They could have still probably built a beautiful cutting edge website, but made it searchable. You know, have it so that the search engines can find the pages and find the content and actually index the pages. But then it will have to the text. Totally. And it happens, like I say, nine times out of ten easily. Now that's being optimistic. Now let's say, okay, we've got a lot of small business people listening to this. And perhaps they don't have the kind of money to hire all this talent. I'm going to ask you what you think they should do. But for start, my thought would be, look, the first thing you spend the money on is just getting advisor of some kind. It doesn't have to be a lot of money. It could be two hours you're sitting down with someone. It could be a web marketer. It could be someone that should at least have an understanding of SEO. And that's not too hard to find, at least for basic SEO. In the very least, you could even ask someone on forums, look, I need some help with this. Anyone definitely want to volunteer. And when you get that, then you at least get a better picture of what you need in your site. Then you know what to ask your designer. If you're going to do it yourself, you're going to contact the designer. At least you know what to ask them. Hey. They could even head to the new chat room in Webmaster Radio. There's a lot of SEOs hang out there now. Especially John, some of the bigger shows. You got it. We're going to be doing it at some point. We haven't scheduled it yet, but keep listening. We're going to have a day where John and I are going to be on the forum just answering questions for 30 minutes or an hour. We're not exactly sure yet. But it's all up in the area now, but we're pretty excited about it. But you're right. If you just spent a little bit of time. I mean, even a little bit of time with that horror story I just told. You know, an hour of them saying this is what we have planned. And me saying no, no, no, don't do that because this is the problem. Would have saved tremendous amounts of effort and energy and time and money. My head's shaking, man. It's just bad. I wish I had that kind of money. Me too. So what else, John, we've reached the end of our list, but I know there's stuff that's just waiting to be talked about on this subject. I guess it's really just think about a lot of things we talked about as far as navigation structure and keyword targeting and XML files and how many redirection you can have. That's not all just for a redesign. If you're building a brand new site from scratch, you have to think about these things too. You know, the content management system that you use if you're changing from one to the other can be a huge, a huge issue, you know, depending on one works one way and one works another. If you're switching from server to server or IP to IP. If you're not changing, but this is actually a good point. If you're switching servers, whether you're switching hosting companies or just changing a server and getting a new IP address, it's not an issue at all for you unless you're changing your pages too. So it's not really a redesign issue, but if you're moving your site, it's more of a move issue. Unless you're changing the site, don't worry too much about moving it. As long as it's not down very long, if you're down less than, you know, hopefully you won't be down at all during the move, but if you have to be down, if you're less than an hour, you should be fine. If you go down for a couple of days, you could get hit by the spider and it's a season. There's no site and then all of a sudden you're out of the index, but as soon as it comes back, as soon as it finds again, the engines realize that there's going to be times when servers are down, so they won't stop coming back because there's no site. So when it comes back and it finds you again, you'll be right back in a search. So that's just a matter of how quick the spiders get around. So that's one thing we didn't cover that I think would be important when you're talking about this moving as opposed to redesigning and just redesigning. Now, if you're moving and designing, there you go, you've got to think about all those other issues. Excellent. Yeah. And the last one before we tie it up here is one night, I just can't believe we didn't really cover it yet, and that is once you've launched a site, keep a hawk eye on your Google Webmaster Tools. You're going to see a lot of stuff happening there. When things start to happen, that is, you know, once Google has gone back to the site, you're going to start seeing things like 404s, no matter what you do, almost, I mean, I haven't seen yet. No matter how good we are at the transition, there's always been something, either something has been missed or some error or something. It's tiny, maybe it's totally useless page, but it's still something you can fix. Google Webmaster Tools has a ton, a ton of data on that. And Joan, you've got another important-- Yes. Another thing that I thought that we can't believe we didn't cover yet is, especially when you're doing a redesign, most of the time when you're doing a redesign, you're building the site in a development environment. And you're either having a third party do it, or you're doing it yourself. I can't tell you how many times the third party or the developer environment is open up to the search engines and gets indexed. Make sure when you have a development environment, you're blocking that from the search engines using robot.txt or password access to the development environment. If that gets indexed prior to launching your new site, you're going to have issues because the new structure and the new content and the new site is already being indexed in another place. Now you've got to deal with 301 redirects from not only your old site, but from your development environment, and that can be a huge headache. Not to mention different pricing, whatever it is on that development site, it can be quite a nightmare. And even legal, you know, disclaimers, all that stuff may not be present on your development site. I mean, there's a whole can of Webmaster, if you let off on that one. Most definitely. And one little last tweet before we cut here is also, whatever you had blocked on the old site, blocked again, if it happens to be in the same area, you know, you could have a central area of your site. You didn't want the search engines to index and you forget to add that on the new design. That can be a bit of a problem as well. Well, on behalf of myself, Rasta, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and John Carca, SEO Manager from MediaWiz. Thank you for joining us today on SEO 101 on webmaster radio.fm. We'll be tuning in for our show next week. Thanks, everybody. [MUSIC]