Upgrading Site to improve ranking/conversion rate.

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olimess

Joined: Apr 22, 2008

# Posts: 3

Posted: 04/22/2008 08:02 am

Hi everyone.

I’m new to this forum and was hoping that I could get some advice/insight on how to properly upgrade a web site without negatively affecting the current Google rankings in order to improve our rankings and conversion rate?

Here is a little background. For some time our web site has ranked number 1 for several important keywords.

With in the last year or so we have begun to notice several changes with regards to Google SERP, Google algorithm, the increase and level of competition, our traffic and our conversion rate.

It’s no secret that Google has been busy making large and small changes the last couple of years. Many websites have been affected positively and negatively. We’ve seen a couple of our keyword rankings fall from number 1 to 2 or 3 and are scared that this trend may continue. I think our drop in rankings has as much to do with our competitors as it has to do with Google since they likely have been pushing for quite some time to beat us.

Obviously this all means loss of traffic for us. But even more disconcerting is that I have also noticed a drop in our conversion rate. I believe this is a direct result of more and better competition.

So after much analysis and debate I decided that the best thing we could do is to first tackle our web site by upgrading it to be more “professional” and competitive against other sites. The original design has much to be desired and when compared by visitors against other sites, they’ll likely choose the other sites.

Back to the question at hand …

The planned upgrade will be done in phases. First I want to change the “look” of the site while attempting to keep the majority of the site content and link structure intact. Next I would like to tweak the current content and structure to make it a little better. After this, I would like to add more sections and information to the site to make it larger and deeper in content. Finally I would like to solicit links. Is my planned approach flawed or can it be done better?

Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated. This is one of those situations where the little guy is trying to stand up against the much bigger competition!

Thanks,
Olimess

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Quadrille

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Joined: Nov 15, 2000

# Posts: 1046

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Posted: 04/22/2008 08:53 am

The best way to make changes without doing short term harm for long term good, is to ge gradualist; sure you can change the whole site's URL's and use 301s and rewrites, but it will be cleaner and safer (no human errors) if you make such changes for one part of the site at a time, allowing the SEs to assimilate the changes over a cycle or two before the next change - while you'll still lose toolbar PR, the 'new' pages will appear in serps pretty quickly, just as extra pages would.

Still doing 301s won't hurt, of course, particularly if some of your deeper pages had their own links.

But if you can tweak the content and design without changing URL, even better.

From an SEO angle, MORE content will probably be more effective (and less risk) than CHANGED content ... which may not help at all.

Whatever you do, use xenu as you go along, and do some housekeeping before you start eg get rid of non-related reciprocals, avoid duplicate URLs, remove duplicate content ... etc., etc.

Keep in touch with what Google is doing; if changes may effect your site, plan ahead - aim specifically to take advantage of changes, not be hit by them - for example, when 'nofollow'came in, wise webmasters used it immediately, if their sites had blogs, forums or guest books. They didn't wait for the collateral damage that followed.

But the key point in change is Cool URIs don't change

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olimess

Joined: Apr 22, 2008

# Posts: 3

Posted: 04/22/2008 11:06 am

Thanks for the info and tips Quadrille.

The gradualist approach is a good call. Perhaps I will upgrade section by section instead of one wholesale upgrade.

As for 301 redirects, fortunately I will not need to rely in this since I will be upgrading overtop of existing pages and will not be renaming these pages.

Again, good idea about the house keeping first. I have actually been doing that now ... making sure that everything is in order before I begin my upgrade process.

By 'nofollow' ... under what circumstances might this be used?

Thanks again for your thoughts.

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Quadrille

Insider

Joined: Nov 15, 2000

# Posts: 1046

Website

Posted: 04/22/2008 12:27 pm

I only included that as an example ... it only affects you if you allow 'third parties' to post URLs on the pages - the theory is, that you are responsible for your outgoing links, and so won't do anything silly. But you cannot trust your 'guests' to be so sensible ... so 'nofollow' protects you from eeejits linking to spam/scam/bad sites that would otherwise harm your SE rankings.

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olimess

Joined: Apr 22, 2008

# Posts: 3

Posted: 04/22/2008 01:51 pm

Ahhh .. I see. That makes sense. Now, correct me if I'm wrong but can nofollow also be used to control the flow of pagerank with in a site as well? If so, would this be considered a "good" or "bad" SEO technique?

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Quadrille

Insider

Joined: Nov 15, 2000

# Posts: 1046

Website

Posted: 04/22/2008 02:19 pm

For most sites, a pointless exercise, and one that could go wrong. Also, it's *negative*; trying to add PR to one page by denying another. Enough to burn the brain!

Personally, I'd go for

(a) a good internal navigation system, so that wherever people landed, they can find what they want

(b) remember that SEs see PAGES not sites; page optimization is much more likely to get the desired result (which, I assume is people arriving at the page most appropriate for their search wink

(c) you can always add 'juice' to a particluar page by getting external links to that page; much more specific

(d) page rank is a sad obsession, and one to be avoided smile

But I have to admit that PR tinkering by nofollow manipulation does have its fans.

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