Help on prioritizing SEO and new Site Redesign.

[Jermooski]

Hello Everyone!

First time poster long time reader. Here is my question.

We have a client that is interested in redesigning their current website and optimizing what they currently have. The current site is not optimized at all and the internal pages are not indexed. They would like to approach a redesign/SEO process in the following chronolgical order:

1. Optimize the current site.
2. Submit to search engines.
3. Redesign the same site.
4. Submit to search engines again.

My question is... would you advise a client to submit an old site, then completely redo the whole site and submit again? We are not at the design phase of the new site, so content could drastically change. Actually, they are going to have a couple hundred new products online, so the whole site map and content is up in the air.

I guess we could use the "revisit" parameter in the header, but I just dont want to have the client spend money, to then change everything and possibly affect search results.

Miigwech niibowa and thanks for your help!

Jer

[KeithO]

forget submitting. its a waste of time. your best bet would be to begin the redesign and get it up then submit your sitemap to google's sitemaps program. the SE's already have knowledge of the site's existence so submission is not necessary. start building up the new site and start generating more IBL's.

[Jermooski]

That makes sense.. thanks.

[dburdon]

Jermooski,

get some and change content as you go. Check the last time the site was indexed. Forget the revisit tag.

[Duncan Pollock]

You cetainly don't need to do any submitting/resubmitting. By the nature of things, the spiders revisit sites on a regular basis and -- if your luck holds -- will upgrade yours in the SERPs if/as the changes warrant/suggest it.
Your priority should be on optimizing what's there and doing whatever it takes to justify an improvement in its present position.
Nevertheless, as has been said more than once, an additional requirement is PATIENCE. The search engines take their own sweet time to reward SEO efforts.

Duncan

[incrediblehelp]

Remember if the URLs change in any way (page names, directory names, page extensions) you have to do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page. This is the biggest thing missed in a website redesign.

[Jermooski]

Thanks you guys, those are all good points to keep in mind. The 301, the patience, forget revisit, all good points we can use.

As a side note, the site is aprx. 30+ pages, but the original designer used a javascript floating nav system. The only page indexed is the default page, all the internal pages are toast. I tried copy/pasting specific sentences in google and there was no reference at all. So, first thing is to dump the nav.

Thanks Again.

Jer

[cyanide]

You can enter site:yourdomain.com in the search engines to see which pages are in the index.

[wuxingrun]

As I know, fresh content is the most important, not submit.