Many web design companies after some time decide to change their current website. The owner sometimes simply states that he doesn’t like the old site and wants something new. The creation of a web design company without paying attention to how it does it. The business owner has no idea how certain mechanisms work on the Internet and they don’t need to know about it. After all, web design is not his business – he is the customer here.
But if a company that deals with it professionally does not take into account important issues related to the creation of a new page – then it can do the client a disservice, give a shot in the knee, for which the customer will gladly pay.
But what’s the matter?
Everything breaks down so that the new site does not lose the visitors it had with the old version. And additionally – acquire new, new Internet users who did not hit the old version of the site, and should, of course, come with the new one. Here are 6 important things you may not know about, but the web design company that designs your new website must know:
1. Creating a website architecture for SEO
SEO is a website optimized for search engines (Search Engine Optimization). When a search engine finds its way to your website, one of the most important things it does is check all the relationships between the pages on it. Generally speaking, it is about determining how individual pages of your new website will be linked together. This is important because pages that will be linked to many others have more “weight” than those that are “connected” to only one of your site’s sub pages.
One way to do this is by navigating the menu (next/previous) or by displaying tags or categories.
Example: If you give a link to the “contact” page from each page on the site, this page will be more important for the search engine than the “access map” page, which will be connected to only one page, e.g. “how to get there”. This so-called internal link popularity and Google calls it internal PageRank.
2. Categorization and avoidance of duplicate content
When people search for information on the Internet using search engines, they usually have a problem, question, or expect accurate information. These expectations and questions are reflected in the keywords and phrases you type in the search box. The more you find ways to categorize content on your new page, the greater the chance that you’ll reach more potential customers.
3. New website and change of website addresses
Your old website has been on the web for some time. It had several subpages that were quoted on forums, in advertisements – they were forever in many places. When the search engine finds these ads and forums, it will follow them and won’t find the page (because you changed the website to a new one) – then you can lose a lot.
Similarly, with Internet users who can click on the link on the forum or business card, and will not see the page they expect. You need to know that if the addresses of the pages in the new version are different than the old ones, it will take some time before the search engines index them and evaluate them appropriately.
4. How to make the navigation menu
The links contained in the navigation menu must be made in such a way that search engines can read and analyze them. Menus made in DHTML or Flash technology are nice and effective (they can animate, play sounds, change colors, and shapes), but in most cases, they are completely invisible to search engines.
This means that these links – after all, the most important in the whole site, visible on each of its subpages – do not receive scoring in the internal popularity ranking
5. Editing HTML elements
Some content management systems (CMS) based on which companies create websites do a lot of things for the site administrator. For example, the automatic creation of HTML tags responsible for the page title, meta tags, headers, links, and photos is a very helpful tool. But your new page must allow you to enter HTML tags yourself as you deem appropriate in your particular situation.
6. Friendly URLs and session IDs
By entering some websites, you’ll see the so-called session ID. The address of the page in the browser bar.
Everyone who visits such a website – a surfer and a search engine – receives a different session ID. Thanks to such identifiers, you can specify a specific Internet user and, e.g. remember his login and password so that he does not have to log in every time. Unfortunately for search engines that visit this site, the session ID makes it a completely different address. And every time they visit your website they get a completely different identifier – so they recognize that this is another page that has been added to the site.
The content of the page is identical, so when the robots come several times a week they have several addresses of the same page. As a result, the page is considered duplicate content and can be excluded from the search results. If you need to use such “unfriendly” URLs for some other reason, ask the company that creates your new page to hide all session IDs for search engine robots.
Friendly URLs are also subpage file names that do not contain any “weird” elements.
