Every customer asks “So why do you suggest to rebuild my site, I just want to be in the first 5 results on Google.” Well Search Engine Watch just wrote a pretty good article about 7 of the reasons why it is smart to plan you SEO as part of a redesign, or to think about it when you are creating your site the first time.
To summarize these points they are
- Analytics
- Well Written (Semantic) URLs
- XML Sitemaps
- Control Indexing
- 301 Redirects
- Canonicalization
- Site Speed
And to summarize the article, well….
Ensure that your site uses freely available analytic packages, well written URLs that refer to the pages content, enable xml sitemaps, manage what content is indexed by using “nofollow” tags, make sure you use 301 redirects they are easy, only use 1 link per page and make sure your site is fast!
And that is why you should start your Search Engine Optimization activities with a site redesign or technical rebuild in most cases.