Considerations when redesigning a website

One of the things I see web designers forget about when redesigning a web site if the fact that the existing pages are already indexed in the search engine. So here is what you need to remember. First of all, a search engine indexes the path and file name of the page. So if you have a page called contact.html and you change the page to contactus.html and remove the previous page the search engine will visit a page that no longer exists and will delist it from the engine. Don't fight yourself on this, keep as many page names as you can, this will ensure you keep the search engines coming back to pages that exist. Another consideration is that Google's PageRank system is linked to the page via the page name, so your new page will start at a pagerank of 0 instead of the previous page's rank.