It may seem incredible, yet a website makeover can actually hurt the age of your website and search engine ranking if you or your designer decide to rename the file names of each page.

For established small business website owners, the decision to do a site makeover requires careful consideration to avoid affecting the search engine optimization value. Changing text content to reflect adjustments in your products or services makes sense. Enhanced graphics are okay, too.

Adding new pages of original quality content is always beneficial to attracting search engines to your website more often. However, problems can begin if your website makeover and redesign goes beyond aesthetics or basic content.

The age of each page on your site is one of many key factors for seo, or search engine optimization. New pages that you add get zero ranking when they are first released. Changing the file name of a ranked page on your site during a website redesign will ruin that ranking value. An established page with years of aging that you then rename suddenly becomes new with zero rank even if you keep the text and graphic content identical.

My advice to avoid losing the age value is ensuring you use as many of the original page file names when doing a redesign. If this seems impossible, an alternate choice is using 301 redirects which is similar to a 404 page not found to alert people and search engines about missing pages. The 301 redirect, however, is code that can automatically send a visitor coming to page A to your new page B without any loss of aging or seo value.

Finally, consider that many sites may have links to your old page file names. You risk a loss in traffic if all those links result in the page not found error. You may contact me about optimal methods of 301 redirects if undergoing a small business website makeover.