Most businesses typically go through website redesigning phases every 2 years or so. Major businesses that rely on the internet for most of their dealings redesign more so often.

Here at QuickRanks, we always recommend our clients when going over a website redesigning phase to start all design and development discussions with SEO in mind. Rob Garner of MediaPost Search Insider made an outline of the major considerations when designing an enterprise website with greater focus on search engine visibility.

In brief, here’s Rob Garner’s list:

• Use site language and messaging that is consistent with the user's perception of your product or service.
• Read your log files (and/or review analytics reports).
• Ensure that RIAs are both crawlable and indexable by search engines.
• Avoid the creation of URL canonicalization issues.
• Set up a redirection plan.
• Perform gap analysis, and don't remove content that supports coveted rankings without assessing risks first.
• Include search as both business and technical requirements before planning has even started.
• Ensure that there is a voice for search within the Web site team structure.

Use site language and messaging that is consistent with the user's perception of your product or service.

Take note, search engines are ultimately judged by how relevant their results pages are on queries. That makes KEYWORD the lingua franca that builds bridges between your website and their respective audience. That means your website’s content should not only connect well to the users it also should connect well to search engines.

Developing contents that are relevant and engaging is still top priority for any website, however, more so today especially in the light of Google’s—and most websites not named Bing—efforts to return relevance on their search results page. Right now spam, keyword stuffed, sleazy web content and garbage Q&A sites run amok on the internet, and major search engines like Google are developing algorithms that will exclude such sites from their indices.

Read your log files (and/or review analytics reports).

Often overlooked, website analytics is an extremely useful tool that can give you insight about your audiences’ onsite browsing behavior as well as prevalent online trends. It helps you analyze on how well a particular strategy or a particular page is working in terms of converting search engine traffic. And most of these tools are free too.

Ensure that RIAs are both crawlable and indexable by search engines.

One reason why SEO hates Rich Internet Technologies (RIA) like Ajax or Flash is because web crawlers can’t read text within packaged files. Although that changed somehow in 2008 when Google and Yahoo announced their web engines now allow RIA indexing, Bing and a majority of other websites are still playing catch up.

There are obvious advantages when using RIAs however, and one of these is increased audience experience from an engagement standpoint, which is very important since it results to return visits and, in all likelihood, foster viral marketing via word of mouth.

Here at QuickRanks, we don’t discourage the use of RIAs. Instead, we offer cohesive solutions—like using SWFObject or having a mirror html version website—to make sure Flash content is crawlable by search engine spiders.

Avoid the creation of URL canonicalization issues. Set up a redirection plan.

URL canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL among several choices. This is especially true to home pages. Matt Cutts of Google have more to say about canonicalization.

Basically, whenever pages are moved, it is imperative that you use 301 redirects to let search engines know that these pages now exists at different URLs. Set up a redirection plan and also 404 for pages that don’t exist anymore.

Perform gap analysis, and don't remove content that supports coveted rankings without assessing risks first.

If there is anything your old pages have over the new ones, it’s the page rank and link value. Completely deleting an obsolete page is an equivalent of wasting not only hard work done on that page but also the page’s secured position at the SERPs.

Don’t do this; instead, utilize a 301 redirect to the new page to preserve the page rank and link value that has been established. This is a follow up on the previous recommendation, which is mapping out old URLs to the new URLs and executing redirects.

Include Search as both business and technical requirements before planning has even started. Ensure that there is a voice for Search within the Web site team structure.

Going back about Flash not readable by search engines, one of the major reasons for this problem lies on the developers not knowing enough SEO. There are good developers that don’t do SEO, or rather, they don’t factor Search in their design and development planning. And as a result, marketers pay high prices to resolve the mistakes that should have been address the first time.

A solid development team for an enterprise website should have at least one voice dedicated for Search within the structure. This will help ensure that the website is well planned, well executed and highly soluble to organic searches.

Here at QuickRanks, we champion such cause in all website redesign phases. We can help you come up with solutions that will help in your future search engine rankings. We are also web developers that know SEO fully well, and we can work well in collaborative environment with your own web development team.

Contact us today and we can discuss with you the best strategy for your business plus the options that will surely fit you.