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When making a major change to existing content it is important to remember that it could have knock on effects for your conversion rates and for search engine rankings and other marketing efforts. Planning and preparation, where necessary, will certainly help ensure that the change is as seamless as possible and that rankings do not drop. Changing web content is usually a safe and acceptable process but it will certainly pay dividends to track the data and ensure that ranking and traffic doesn’t drop, and conversions remain around the same level.

Tracking Data

Before beginning any major changes on a website it is always advisable to record figures and keep a back up of the old version. If figures drop too drastically for an extended period of time then you can use the back up copy of the old content to help regain previous results. As well as tracking search engine results and traffic levels you should consider conversion rates, visit length, and any other data you track.

Major Changes In Performance

Most website changes will result in some changes to your site’s performance (be it your traffic levels or your conversion rates) but these don’t necessarily have to be negative or indeed long term. The search engine results are constantly changing because of new links, new pages, altered pages, and deleted content. Results have been known to settle down after some initial changes so some time should be given to ensure that this isn’t the case.

Accessibility And Navigation

The important thing when changing any content is first ensuring that the new content is accessible. This means that human visitors’ browsers can load the pages quickly and that as many people using different browsers, operating systems, and systems are able to view the content. This is particularly important for Flash and other animated design. Ensure that search engine spiders are able to crawl all pages and index the content you’ve added.

Clean, Compliant Code

All new content should be appropriately formatted and also use W3C compliant coding practices. This further helps ensure good site accessibility and keeps the code on your site clean. Clean code will cause fewer problems over a broad range of different settings. Different browsers and operating systems have different requirements and compliant code should avoid any problems.

Performance Tracking

Tracking performance is an important step in any SEO project, as it is with any form of marketing. In the case of search engine optimisation you should certainly track ranking for your best performing keywords and total search engine traffic. By using clean code and ensuring that any changes are ethical you can also ensure the least impact on your site possible.

Changing Content And SEO

Effective search engine optimisation will drive targeted traffic, resulting in active visitors. Targeted visitors like this will be more inclined to make purchases, click links, and remain on the pages of your site. Whatever the desired action on your website, targeted traffic from organic search engine result pages is beneficial for your site.

Doorway pages are considered bad SEO because they attempt to display one version
of a page to the search engine spiders, but redirect human visitors to the
actual page. In the eyes of the search engine this is the equivalent of trying
to hide something from them and it is deemed as an attempt to artificially
manipulate the search results to gain a favourable ranking.

How A Doorway Works

The doorway page itself, which is visible only to search engine spiders, usually
includes illegible text that is nothing more than masses and masses of keyword
instances. If a human visitor were to reach the doorway page then it would
be a useless and irrelevant page to land on. Because search engines aim to
offer their users, and your eventual visitors, the best possible pages they
deem doorway pages as being manipulative.

Doorway Page Software

Doorway page creation software is all over the Internet. You simply enter
a URL, add your primary keywords, and the software does the rest, creating
pages of spam with a bit of code. These pages are then added to your web server
account and they act as a “doorway”. The doorway remains closed to search engines,
but is automatically opened to human visitors.

Avoiding The Doorway

Using a doorway page not only means you run the very real risk of getting
your pages penalised or banned, but it is a next to useless practice anyway.
Search engines do not deem spam filled pages as being good content and so those
pages, be they doorway or static pages, will not get a good ranking in the
main engines.