I recently had this very good question from one of my marketing consultant clients about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and thought others would find the answer valuable:
"Say you have a site and it ranks very high in natural search. If you revise the site creatively, but keep the content, but it’s reorganized, will you maintain your ranking? In other words, what does changing your site creatively do to your ranking?"
The bottom line is once you’re doing SEO and you’ve earned some search engine rankings then any further changes to the site must be considered from the SEO standpoint. However, some things are pretty safe and continuing to develop and grow the site is never a bad thing–you must continue to develop your site.
What is generally pretty safe to do without causing SEO problems is:
- adding or modifying images/graphics,
- adding new copy,
- adding new pages
Don’t sweat this stuff above.
What can cause SEO problems is:
- removing copy,
- revising copy completely,
- removing pages,
- changing page file names,
- changing the site architecture (if your site has a single tier directory architecture then no big deal here)
- duplicating existing content
Anything that could cause a search engine to either lose track of an existing page, or assess a page as being less strongly centered around a keyword phrase is potentially bad for seo. Removing and changing content can certainly cause this problem and should be done carefully.
Tags: Search Engine Copy Writing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Rankings, seo, Seo Copy Writing, SEO Mistakes
