This is something a website owner dreads more than almost anything else, the task of revamping a website without disrupting the delicate balance of a business’ internet presence. The risks of losing customers, losing website information, and losing the very important search results rankings are very real and can do long-term damage to the bottom line of the business. However, there are some things you can do to mitigate any potential damage to your business. Do Not Work on a Live Website This is the single most important thing to remember when making changes to your website. Do not do any kind of redesign to your website while it is live. Either disable the website while you’re making improvements (not recommended, because people who attempt to visit the website will be frustrated), or set up the new website on a separate domain and swap it with the original when ready (this is the recommended method). When you make changes to a website, it’s often a long process, and mistakes are bound to be made, so it’s easier to not have to deal with the issues of working on a live website. Match The Structures of the Old and New Websites Customers like familiarity, so it’s not a good idea to dramatically change the structure of your website when you redesign it. Before you get started on a new design, user a crawler to map out your existing website, how things are laid out, so that you can match the new website with it. Once you’re finished with the redesigned website, crawl the new site to compare its structure to the original site. Save The Original Website Information To keep similarity between the old and new websites, create a list of all the pages from the old website. If the URL is going to change for pages in the new website, you need to notify search engines about these changes by using 301 redirects. Failure to do this will damage your rankings and trust with customers, and you will lose organic traffic to your website. You should also save your sitemap of the original website to a text file, for reference later. Use a Temporary URL for the New Website This is how you avoid disruption in the transition from the old website to the new one. Set up the new website on a temporary URL, copying your old website to the temporary URL. Then make whatever changes you want. Make sure that you noindex this temporary URL, because you don’t want it to appear in search engine results until you’re ready to make the new website live. Once you’re finished with the new website, you can just switch the domain, and take the new website live. If you are changing domains with your new website, there are two steps to that process. First, move the old website to the new domain, with 301 redirects. Create your new website, and then launch it on the new domain, with 301 redirects from the old website.

Getting ranked on the first page of google ensures heavy traffic. If you have a keyword with a high search volume that has the potential of bringing you huge sales, PFP SEO is your best bet. Raking on the first page ensures that a large number of people land on your website, thereby increasing the chances of conversion. This works only if you have those competitive keywords that drive sales. Pay for performance is also a great option if you are considering Pay per click. With only 20% of people clicking on the paid results, PPC is an expensive alternative. 80% of the users prefer to click on the organic search results. Getting exposure to this 80% in a short time-frame is only possible with Pay-for-performance SEO. However, if your business is missing those sales driving keywords, it is better to opt for monthly SEO services to improve your overall SEO score. By targeting on competitive keywords, you are probably missing out on the long tail keywords. If your website is absolutely relevant to the competitive keywords, the traffic coming from first page rankings have higher chances to convert. However, if your potential buyers are more complex coming from a variety of keywords, it is best to go for Traditional SEO.

Yahoo was the original search giant, when it first launched back in the 1990s. Google has long since eclipsed it in popularity as a search engine, but Yahoo still has a significant share of search activity. 2011 will be a key year for Yahoo. By that time, if not sooner, Yahoo plans to give up its own search technology and be “powered” by rival Bing, which is owned by Microsoft. This type of “coopetition” used to be common in the search engine industry. Whether it will succeed for Yahoo remains to be seen. In the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, Yahoo will continue to maintain its own Yahoo brand. Its “editorial results” will come from Bing — and rankings at Yahoo will be exactly like you see at Bing, Yahoo has told us. However, Yahoo may alter the look-and-feel around those results, as well as provide additional information that it hopes will make it more compelling than Bing as a search engine. Yahoo will also carry paid search ads that come from Bing. If you’re a small company, you’ll buy those ads directly from Bing, using self-serve forms. If you’re a big advertiser, someone that has an account representative to help, Yahoo will work directly with you — though the ads ultimately will still get placed into Bing’s back-end system. Major Yahoo Services Yahoo provides more than web search. Below are a few of our popular Yahoo categories, where you can read past coverage: : Our “everything” category, this lists all stories we’ve written about Yahoo, regardless of subtopic. : One of Yahoo’s big success stories, Yahoo Answers allows anyone to ask a question and get back answers from the Yahoo Answers community. : Coverage about Yahoo’s popular web site bookmarking service. : Stories about Yahoo’s popular photo sharing service. : By some measures, Yahoo is the most popular news site in the United States. Articles about the news search engine. : While Yahoo Search is slated to be powered by Bing, Yahoo still plans its own unique search offerings. This category tracks what Yahoo does in web search. : Yahoo’s search advertising system, Yahoo Search Marketing (or “Panama, ” as it is known to search marketing veterans), is set to close as part of the Microsoft deal. But while it continues to operate, we continue to track it. : Until Bing takes over, Yahoo still has its own unique results, and this category has coverage of tips and advice for webmasters and marketers looking to rank better in Yahoo. Yahoo Resources Those interested in Yahoo may also wish to keep an eye on the company’s official blog, Yahoo Anecdotal. Yahoo also maintains the Yahoo Search Blog, which covers search-related topics. The YSM Blog is aimed at Yahoo’s search advertising customers. Yahoo press releases can be found here.

Stands for "Search Engine Optimization." Just about every Webmaster wants his or her site to appear in the top listings of all the major search engines. Say, for example, that Bob runs an online soccer store. He wants his site to show up in the top few listings when someone searches for "soccer shoes." Then he gets more leads from search engines, which means more traffic, more sales, and more revenue. The problem is that there are thousands of other soccer sites, whose Webmasters are hoping for the same thing...

WordPress.com is a service that doesn’t allow users to install plugins to add functionality. Because of this, users are at the mercy of WordPress.com and the tools it offers for managing SEO. These tools have expanded with the ability to create custom meta descriptions, custom title formats, and live previews now available to WordPress.com Business Plan customers. Custom Meta Descriptions allow you to create an excerpt of text that is used by search engines and is displayed in search results. You can also customize how page titles appear by rearranging attributes...

Google has reportedly taken action on sites participating in private blog networks, also known as PBNs. On September 18th, Google sent out widespread manual action notices via Google Webmaster Tools to these sites for “thin content” spam. Private Blog Networks, PBNs, are generally groups of blogs or sites often controlled by one publisher, with the goal of building up links within the network as a way to help particular content rank better in Google. They aren’t really “private” from Google or the public. They can be seen but the “private” name seems to come out of the idea they aren’t really meant for public visitors but instead just to generate links mainly for SEO ranking purposes. Some SEOs and Webmasters use these PBNs to artificially inflate their Google rankings either through content spamming or link spam. Here is a screen shot of the manual action Spencer received: Those who run PBNs are not convinced this is the end for their networks. As reported, Alex from a PBN wrote on a black hat forum that he doesn’t “believe the end of PBNs is somewhere near, ” but he did admit “of the current wave of PBN de-indexation.” He still thinks quality PBNs have a shot but clearly, PBNs are something Google is not a fan of. We asked Google for a comment and they responded they do not comment if it’s about particular manual actions. We do however believe that this manual action was indeed very widespread and should be seen as a major blow to those using PBNs for search spam.

An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can't see and understand a web page the same way a human can. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users. A Common Argument Against SEO We frequently hear statements like this: "No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code, and still find a way to return the most relevant results, not the ones that have been 'optimized' by unlicensed search marketing experts." But Wait ... Imagine you posted online a picture of your family dog. A human might describe it as "a black, medium-sized dog, looks like a Lab, playing fetch in the park." On the other hand, the best search engine in the world would struggle to understand the photo at anywhere near that level of sophistication. How do you make a search engine understand a photograph? Fortunately, SEO allows webmasters to provide clues that the engines can use to understand content. In fact, adding proper structure to your content is essential to SEO. Understanding both the abilities and limitations of search engines allows you to properly build, format, and annotate your web content in a way that search engines can digest. Without SEO, a website can be invisible to search engines. The Limits of Search Engine Technology

Free Reading List Is your website content costing you sales? Get our free, curated list of high-impact copywriting tips. Get the free reading list Moz: The SEO Monolith What it is: Moz is a leader in the SEO world, with a robust blog and a suite of free and paid products. Initially an SEO consulting company, Moz has morphed into one of the go-to resources for all things SEO. How retailers can use it: Technically speaking, Moz is really multiple SEO tools, not just one. And each tool has distinct offerings and benefits for retailers: Moz Pro: Moz Pro will help your website content, improving your rankings and visibility, as well as provide a ton of actionable and insightful data along the way. Keyword explorer: This is a great place to start if you have some keywords in mind for which you’d like to rank. Receive a full analysis, including difficulty to rank and related keywords to explore. This is a feature of Moz Pro, but the two free queries each day make it valuable even if you don’t subscribe to Pro. Moz Local : Especially helpful for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations, Moz Local will make sure “that your business listings are correct, consistent, and visible across the web.” This is important for making your location discoverable! You need to make it as easy as possible for web users to find out your physical, real-life location, and this is one way to do that across multiple databases. Google.com: The Legend What it is: Although this search engine likely doesn’t need an introduction, Google is the place where most search queries happen (approximately 66%, compared to Bing’s 33%). How retailers can use it: While users turn to Google to perform searches, retailers can use it as a source of information. Notice how, as you search, Google offers predicted text? This is based on similar searches to your own, indicating that these are related phrases to your content. Let’s say you sell fanny packs. Type “fanny packs” in the Google search bar. Notice the predicted searches.

Our goal for on-page SEO is also the client's goal, namely, to radically improve the website potential by making it rank better in search engines and consequently to increase organic traffic. As a result, a perfectly optimized website creates a robust business performance. We get to the bottom of on-page SEO problems, so that Google and other search engines clearly see, and understand, what your website is about. So, just how do we make this happen? And what differentiates us from our SEO competitors? 1. We adapt all the important website elements to improve SEO At the end of the day, even if your website is built using high quality and optimized code, and even if its content is interesting and relevant, it will not necessarily rank well in search engines. Sometimes, it may just not be particularly friendly to crawlers. In other words, the technical SEO audit is the key to success. If the technical SEO factors are lacking, then even an otherwise excellent website will not come out on top, or even near the top of a Google search engine result pages. Consequently, your traffic will remain low and the marketing potential will remain unrealized. 2. We play a role as an instigator and facilitator of better teamwork We are well aware that on-page SEO doesn’t simply mean filling out a template or working through an extensive optimization checklist. The times when the job of SEOs was to simply put a target keyword in meta tags are long finished. In doing SEO, we combine client’s technical, marketing, content and sales strategies by valuing the best solutions for the business interests. All too often, the above diverse areas are prone to work as if on separate projects. We get all these factors and optimize their efforts, so that each part of a website works synergistically. 3. Elephate does SEO with marketing know-how We care about all on-page SEO factors, starting with those that are most liable to have a negative impact on search engine rankings. In order to favourably align all the aspects of a website design, we optimize our clients' pages to outperform the competition with traffic higher than ever. We always use state of the art on-page SEO techniques and knowledge of the competitive search engine market in order to produce ranking results that prove the SEO effort is absolutely worth a share of your marketing budget. 4. We do extensive SEO analysis of the website To find the right solutions our SEOs focus on gathering all the technical SEO data from your website. We analyze its optimization level, watching closely to SEO ranking factors, such as keywords, meta tags, urls and internal linking for instance. Then, armed with the knowledge gained by thorough analysis, our work becomes an enlightened effort, not a myth based fumble. By equipping ourselves with relevant data, the best tools available and up-to-date training we implement a methodical and professional SEO approach. At Elephate, we bring to the table years of hard earned on-page SEO experience. As a result, we produce decisive, practical and fruitful optimization solutions that our clients value highly. 5. We manage the Google Panda hazard In practice, not doing on-page SEO right can have very negative ranking consequences. In such cases, an otherwise very good website runs the risk of falling foul of the Google Panda. It is a search algorithm that sorts websites, allocating a lower rank to those that have been poorly optimized. On the other hand, Panda moves websites tuned using advanced search engines optimization techniques towards the top of the search results. Crucially, negative labeling by this Google algorithm can ruin the performance of a website in search rankings for months. This undeniably causes lower web visibility, less traffic, and poor business figures for the client. In the first place, we check if a website is safe from the Google Panda labeling. In the case the negative effects are already in place, we see a quick recovery for the website. 6. We offer key on-page SEO specializations The excellent on-page SEO services we offer in 2016 include: Optimization of technical website details Keyword research and website keyword analysis

If you’ve just recently discovered SEO, you may be feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn. It’s a little like college. You know you can master the material, but it’s going to take time – and if you’re also trying to run a business and maintain some kind of personal life, where will you get the time? Perhaps it’s time to consider an alternative to doing it all yourself. If you’re an SEO yourself, of course, you’ll want to do your own SEO for your business. My father was a CPA, and he always did his own taxes (though he had my mom do the bookkeeping for the business). But the small business owners who used his services often handed that aspect of their workload over to him with a sigh of relief. It let them concentrate on providing their own, very different services to THEIR customers. After all, what does filling out a tax form and dry cleaning a formal gown have in common? And what does your day-to-day work have in common with SEO? This isn’t a moot question; in fact, it’s very relevant to whether it makes more sense to do your website’s SEO yourself or hire a pro. By the way, the kinds of questions I’m going to bring up should sound very familiar to you if you’ve ever had to decide between doing something in-house or hiring someone outside your company to do it. If deciding whether or not to outsource your company’s SEO could be expressed as a math problem, the variables would include time, money, and capabilities. You can’t get around the fact that SEO done right takes up a considerable amount of time. Learning the skill set takes time, as does keeping abreast of new developments. You might be better off spending this time elsewhere. But hiring someone to do it takes money – and hiring someone to do it right can take a lot of money. How do you decide? You might start by actually approaching it as a math problem. Since we’re looking at an investment of time, you need to find out what your time is worth. Yes, I know, if you’ve run the numbers, you’re probably making minimum wage; that’s true for all business owners. Instead, look at what you charge for your products or services. “If you can put a dollar amount for what your time is worth, ” notes Stoney deGeyter, “that can help you determine if you can make time for SEO.” Now that you’ve figured out what your time is worth monetarily, you need to look at your skill set. What do you do better than anyone else? That’s what you should be spending your time doing. If customer relations is your true forte, that’s where you should invest your energy. If you’re best at coming up with new products and services, that’s what you should do. Let go of the idea that you need to do everything; nobody can do everything equally well. Stoney deGeyter suggests that you should “Think about what you can do that provides the greatest benefit for the company before you decide that you should allocate your valuable time to the SEO.”