One week after site redesign - lessons learned

It's been roughly a week since I launched the LemonLime Designs 2011 redesign. I've launched over 20 sites over the years and each time I learn something new. This time it all has to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

I moved over my old blog articles but the URLs weren't the same. Google has my old posts indexed in it's search results but they lead nowhere. This was a huge loss as those were the main traffic drive to the site. Using Drupal's pathauto module, I was able modify the URLs to match the old ones. Google's Webmaster Tools was instrumental in finding these missing pages.

I found that my old photography gallery was also a great traffic drive. While I create it on this site, I've set my robot.txt to ignore the broken gallery links. This way Google doesn't see my site as broken. For the links that may be missed, I installed the search404 module. This amazing module takes visitors to a search results page that displays content that matches what they were looking for. Try this link to see an example.

Once I have all my base content up, I'll be going through each page to add meta descriptions, better page titles, and keywords.