1. Because you can usually get the same company to do both!

A great number of excellent internet marketing firms today have the capability both to do professional, creative, highly functional website designs, and then get the things to rank highly in Google. Dealing with just one company will make it much easier all round for you.

2. Because there are technical ways to ensure you don’t lose your Google ranking when you re-design

Those ways are a little involved (and truthfully, a little boring!) to be going into at the moment. Suffice it to say that Google’s little bots can make some mean assumptions, and SEO firms know how to placate the presumptive beast.

3. Because website design is about more than good looks

Sometimes, website designers have a keen eye for design … but are completely blind to both search-engine friendliness and website usability guidelines. Both of these factors are part of the discipline of SEO, which is why it is valuable to either use the same company, or have your two firms collaborating for your site redesign.

4. Because Flash can be tricky in terms of SEO

Sooooo many website redesigns include Flash elements. That’s because Flash is a wonderful invention and a blessing to the web (despite Jakob Nielsen’s protestations to the contrary!). However, it does need to be handled carefully in an SEO context. It is tempting to have the most important information about your site – headings, taglines etc – within a Flash element, because it is so visible to visitors. However, Flash is invisible to search engines, so you need to be careful what you do with it.

5. Because a redesign is the perfect time to add or change content

And your content is one of the most important on-site aspects of your Google ranking, and because having an internet marketing firm go over it can make a huge difference to your Google positioning!

I know that budget-wise, optimising in conjunction with a redesign can be hard. But there is so much evidence that doing so is best practice for online businesses, that I would always recommend leaving the old site up there a bit longer, and saving up enough cash to do both. Or at least, talk to your internet marketing firm about payment terms!

There are reasons for that. Usually, the culprit of having your site not getting higher ranking in the search engine results page is the on-page aspect of your site optimization. All tons of efforts of off-page optimization are useless if there’s a problem with your site. Your site would have not been search engine friendly.

How would you know that your site is not search engine friendly?

If your site is employing flash, that is one factor of not having your ranking in the SERP improve. It is attractive to the visitors but in the eyes of the search engine spiders, it is a trash. Though spiders can read and index flash, it prioritizes less websites with flash for ranking. What the spiders want is text, lots of them.

Another thing that prevents your site from being search engine friendly is the JavaScript. If you got more JavaScript for your site, that’s really a big problem for SEO. Search engine spiders cannot read it. As a result, the spider won’t be able to know what your site is all about. You can hardly establish your site relevancy when you have more JavaScript for your site.