One of the biggest problems with implementing a digital strategy is figuring out where to start. This gets even worse when there are many options. And let’s face it, there are always many options. Do you focus your efforts on your search engine optimization or do you throw yourself at building a mobile app? Do you spend your time getting up to speed on social networking or do you start a video blog?

A tool I use to help break the logjam feeling of “where do I start?!?” is to think about “importance” versus “viability.” I was introduced to this tool by Dani Giandomenico and have been grateful ever since. Maybe it’ll be useful for you as well.

Importance and viability

When we’re presented with lots of options, as in figuring out what to implement or execute in a digital strategy, it’s helpful to have an aesthetic for sifting the options. That’s all that this importance vs viability thing is: a way to make sense of our options.

What’s important?

If you’re one of those people who likes to talk about “priority” a lot then you already have an inkling of what’s important. But for this tool to be really useful we need to get more concrete. Something is important because without it, your organization will cease to exist. So, in business, something is important only if it provides your team with the resources to continue operating.

That might be a little bit ruthless. But given the temptation to make everything “top priority” making this kind of distinction is a real life-saver. It prevents organizational paralysis.

If you aren’t good at making these kinds of decisions or assessments then it’s a good idea to get some help here. A trusted mentor, a good friend, a consultant.

Here are some questions to help you get started on figuring out how important something really is. These are all yes/no questions. Maybe isn’t an acceptable answer for any of them.

• Can the organization still generate revenue without doing this?
• Can the organization still generate revenue in 8 months without doing this?
• Are our competitors using this to generate revenue?
• Have our best customers explicitly asked us to do this?
• Are the observable actions of our customers pointing us towards doing this?
• Have our best consultants been able to draw a straight line between doing this and the health of our organization?

What is viability?

If you found thinking about importance to be a challenge because there were a lot of “well that would be important if we could do thus and so” then you’re up against viability. Viability is the ability of your organization to actually do the thing that you want to do. It’s your ability to implement and it’s your ability to execute.

The main thing to think about, when examining viability, is “Can we do this right now?” Here are some yes/no questions to help you determine how viable something is:

• Has we done this in the past?
• Do we enjoy and look forward to doing this?
• Do we have all of the physical gear that we need to do this?
• Have we done anything sort of like this in the past?
• Are we going to allocate the time required of us to do this?

Digital strategy in two dimensions

So now that you’ve got a sense of what I mean when I’m talking about Importance or Viability, let’s put it together. Take a pile of options available to you and go through them assigning a number value for Importance and for Viability for each one. I recommend a scale of 1-5 for each one. Anything more than that is really just splitting hairs. If you get really ambitious you can plot them on a graph.

Importance is related to how necessary the thing is to reaching your goals. Viability is how prepared you are to do the thing.

The meaning of each “point” for “important” differ from company to company, even within the same industry. The meaning is even more varied for “viable” from one company to another. So please take the following scale definitions as just an example.

Scale Definition: Importance

1. Worth doing but not very important.
2. Not very important, but is perhaps a step towards another more important goal.
3. This activity has a meaningful impact on our revenue or profit.
4. Our future plans require this to be done. This is how we find new customers.
5. Our organization cannot generate revenue without this.

Scale Definition: Viability

1. This activity will require training, equipment and time but we’re willing to do it.
2. This is sort of like something we’ve done before. We’ll need time and equipment or training to do it.
3. We’ve done this a little bit before but we’ll need new equipment or training.
4. We have done this before and enjoyed doing it. We have all the equipment we need.
5. We’re actively engaged in this right now and enjoy doing it.

Sometimes when I talk to organizations about viability and ask them about whether they enjoy things or not they look at me like I have three heads. It’s important to think about whether you enjoy what you’re doing because it has a huge impact on whether you’ll do it or whether you’ll burn out. Or whether you’ll burn out your team.

Thinking about whether you enjoy doing something is only touchy-feely until all the talent on your team (including yours) goes away.

An example of using Importance and Viability to get started on a digital strategy.

So let’s put this to work for an mythical example, but one that I encounter all the time. Let’s take a hypothetical company: Smile Corp. Smile Corp wants to get new customers and they’ve read all the same blog posts about web marketing that you have.

Smile Corp has come to the conclusion that they need to do some search engine optimization on their website and that they also need to start doing video. Unfortunately, Smile Corp has limited resources and can’t quite get started whole-hog on both of these at the same time.

Time to break out Importance vs Viability!

Smile Corp Digital Strategy Importance vs Viability: Video

First up, Video. Smile Corp has identified video as a requirement for future plans and as a way that they can find new customers. Something to do with actually seeing people smile increasing the likelihood of moving massive amounts of product. They assign Video an Importance of 4 based on this assessment.

When thinking about Viability, Smile Corp realizes it has no clue how to make a video. They’ve never made one before. They also don’t have a video camera. No one on the team dreads making video, but no one is especially excited to make videos either. They assign Video a Viability of 1 based on this assessment.

A chart showing that Smile Corp considers video to be important, but not very viable.

Smile Corp Digital Strategy Importance vs Viability: SEO

Next up is search engine optimization. Smile Corp considers SEO to be pretty important for reaching new customers. Something about 78% of customers looking for new smiles starting their search on the internet. Based on that assessment they rate SEO as a 4 in terms of Importance.

When considering the Viability, Smile Corp has to consider it pretty closely. They haven’t done real search engine optimization before. But from what they gather, it involves writing stuff and publishing it to the web.

The team has written a lot of things in the past and feels comfortable doing it. They also have all the technology they need to write things and publish it to the web. The team will need some training to learn some of the technical ins and outs of SEO, but they feel it’s within their reach. In fact, two of the team members are really excited to learn how to do search engine optimization (poor souls).

Smile Corp averages all of this together: having done something similar, having all the tools required, and having excited team members and come up with a viability of 3. If they didn’t have excited team members they would have only given it a 2.

SEO is both a viable and important activity for Smile Corp

Smile Corp Digital Strategy: Taking action.

Once the charts have been made, Smile Corp senior leadership goes through and makes the call on what to do. The chart that has the biggest blue box is the “low hanging fruit.” In our example, SEO has the biggest blue box so that’s where Smile Corp decides to get started.

Viability, Importance and the role of leadership in digital strategy.

This particular case was pretty easy for deciding what to do. Sometimes the charts have the same size blue box but are weighted towards either Importance or towards Viability. It’s at these times when leadership is especially valuable.

Some leaders will focus on the axis that represents Importance and compel his organization to improve any deficiencies in viability. Other leaders will lean towards the axis that represents Viability and use rapid iteration to stack a quantity of lesser-importance achievements together into a greater whole.

Sometimes there isn’t a right answer on these things. But the decisions that leadership makes when faced with decisions of viability and importance, will define the character of the organization both inside and from the outside.

One thing to keep in mind while using this tool, is that you will get better at it the more you use it. The reason is that your ability to assess how important an activity is or how viable the activity is for your organization will improve. If you are in a position to be making decisions about importance and viability, learning to separate and assess these two characteristics will help you improve those decisions.

Ultimately, the ability to assess these things will have an impact on the success of your decisions.

As people continue to use mobile devices for computing, more and more apps are getting into the location-aware game. Services like Twitter and Pegshot and new social location games like Foursquare and Gowalla are making use of location combined with commentary, photography, and personal status. Oh yeah, and Facebook now has a check-in API.

Passive and Active, Quick or Time-consuming

A business can take advantage of these developments either passively by making sure they have a complete and accurate profile on the services. A business could use the service  actively by going out and using the systems or incorporating promotions based around them.

Example of using location services for marketing

For example, Foursquare is service that people use to “check in” to a location and let their friends know where they are. Every location that someone can “check in” to has a profile on Foursquare itself.

A passive approach to location marketing

A passive approach to using Foursquare to market would include logging in to Foursquare and editing your business profile to include correct street address, phone number and also “tags” that are keywords describing what people might find or do at your location. Users can also leave “tips” of things to try at your establishment or to avoid. Make sure all of these things are complete and accurate and you’ve done due diligence on passive participation on Foursquare.

An active approach to location marketing

If you want to be more actively involved, you can establish either official Foursquare promotions (which alert people who are nearby that there’s a special at your establishment) or unofficial Foursquare promotions (put up a sign that says people who “check in” get something). The theory here is that whenever someone checks in to your business on Foursquare, all of that person’s Foursquare connections know this–increasing brand awareness and maybe even stopping by to see the person who checked in.

So using location marketing, at this point, is primarily about leaving clues and tips and information in the world that others can pick up on.

My friends Rich Nadworny and Nicole Ravlin put on an occasional event in Burlington Vermont called “Social Media Breakfast.” These events are awesome because they bring interesting business speakers to Burlington. This past week they did it at lunch instead of breakfast. The guest speaker was Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation.

The topic of Mitch’s presentation was, of course, social media. I took notes on my iPad using a mind-mapping app called iThoughtsHD. The map, as an image, is below. Green is for examples, little Flags are product/network mentions (thankfully scarce) and little targets are things I thought were especially interesting. The map in outline form is at the end of this post.

For a larger version of this Mitch Joel presentation mindmap, click the pic.

Takeaways from Mitch Joel presentation at Burlington Social Media Breakfast Lunch

Some of the things Mitch Joel said that really made a lot of sense for me:

• “Don’t blog to be known, blog to be knowable.”
• “Doom on agencies that just start off with pretty websites and don’t use analytics.”
• The problem with most analytics initiatives is that they are essentially a boring report once a month–wrong metrics that aren’t meaningful (aka vanity metrics).
• Marketing is not synonymous with advertising.
• What if every single product in the world was remarkable? Then what would you do?
• Don’t get trapped in worrying about “how many people” because that’s a mass media thing.
• If you can’t get your own employees to follow your Facebook page why should anyone else?
• How many followers do you need?
• Start with what you’re good at.
• The difference between people who get social media and those who don’t is attitudinal, not generational. For example, plenty of people in their 50s and 60s use social media.
• Learn the pulse of your market’s appetite for content.
• Make sure the people doing your social media love doing it.

And, as promised above, here’s the full outline of the mind map as generated from iThoughtsHD (the picture makes more sense, but figured I’d blast the text in here too):

See also: Bibi’s post over at the Curve Trends blog and/or the video of the Mitch Joel presentation over at Digalicious.

It’s a real challenge to find clear distinctions between observations and commentary in online media. The web is littered with blog posts that are opinions, repackaged opinions, and responses to repackaged opinions. Now don’t get me wrong, I love good analysis and commentary. But it’s always good to get the full and complete source along with it.

My “Follow Friday” this week is a guy who always does a great job of this.

Why follow Eric Bryn?

In the whole Observe/Orient/Decide/Act (aka OODA Loop) strategic method, being clear on what’s an observation and what is someone’s analysis or commentary is critically important. For those who can find meaning in original research, finding original research and data is critical for making meaning and informing better decisions.

I first started paying attention to Eric Bryn after meeting him at an Inman Connect in San Francisco a number of years back. We were at a vendor party, the place was packed and loud. But we quickly got into talking about web analytics and how traffic data can be put to work in the real estate industry.

Eric was one of those guys who not only got this stuff, but was already doing it and thinking it. Later during the conference I saw him on a panel discussing A/B testing and ways to optimize a home page in a sort of live “real estate site makeover” kind of thing. His comments during that session were spot on.

But what ultimately makes Eric a great person to follow is his ability to find original research online, tease out a few worthwhile insights and then provide a link to the original research. For those of us who are tired of getting pre-chewed opinions on the usual suspects of research and white papers, Eric’s ability to find solid research and willingness to share is a goldmine.

There are, of course, a lot of ways to follow Eric Bryn. I recommend, first and foremost his blog (it’s one of very very few that get directly emailed to me whenever there’s an update), Real Estate Relativity. Given that Eric’s blog is filled with references to research papers, the blog should be of value to those in industries that aren’t real estate.

Other ways to follow Eric Bryn:

• Meet him in person at a conference, I’ve seen him at Inman Connect and several other tech/real estate events.
• Eric Bryn on Twitter
• Eric Bryn on LinkedIn

You may have noticed that Thoughtfaucet got a new homepage. For the next week I’m sending visitors to my most viewed page to a site that isn’t on Thoughtfaucet.com. Why? Because I want to offer some help for someone who has been a long time supporter of me. Giving up my homepage for a week seems a pretty small thing for me to do for someone who was among the very first to encourage and support my first forays into business use of social media.

The details are all available via the Thoughfaucet homepage (if you’re reading this from the Thoughtfaucet blog just click the “Thoughtfaucet Makes Things” text in the nav).

Conducting this program gives me the chance to make as much good from a crumby situation as I can:

1. A friend is directly helped.
2. Someone may have the opportunity to use my services at a discount.
3. The software running the auction, Winwinapps, is built by a friend, so I’m able to give some feedback to her on her new tool.
4. I get to test the SEO impact of “losing” my homepage for a week. You’ll get to hear about it too.
5. The multitude of tangential benefits that come from doing the right thing.

If you are unable to participate in the auction as a bidder, please help me spread the word as far as possible. That helps a ton too. We’ve already started to receive bids and my hope is that we at least make it to my normal rate by the time next Thursday rolls around and the bidding is closed.

Thanks!

Gahlord

These animations are part of a long collaboration between Dewald and Wurzburg in exploring the branding of the children’s media brand, Dogsharks. The collaboration has included work in puppet theater, animation, musical composition and improvisation, story and branding. Thoughtfaucet is, understandably, psyched to have participated in working with Wurzburg’s creation.

“Robert’s approach to story and character development is fearless in it’s embrace of the wide array of intelligences available to people of all ages. It’s exactly the sort of stuff I like working on,” Dewald said, of working with the Dogsharks’ creator. “It’s been a real pleasure to take part in bringing these characters to life in visual and musical terms as well as participating in the narrative process.”

Prix Jeunesse International is a festival put on by the Prix Jeunesse Foundation to help promote quality television for the young, worldwide. It wants to bring forward television that enables children to see, hear and express themselves and their culture, and that enhances an awareness and appreciation of other cultures. Prix Jeunesse International occurs every two years in Munich, Germany.

Dogsharks LLC is a children’s media brand based in Tribeca NYC USA.

Thoughtfaucet is a strategic creative services consultancy/maker based in Burlington, VT. Thoughtfaucet’s work involves on harnessing a observations and analysis to enhance creative processes and inform creative execution for a variety of industries including media/authorship, green technology and real estate (and a few spare outliers in other industries–because hey, why turn down an interesting project just because it doesn’t neatly lump in with all the others). Thoughtfaucet likes to simplify all that and just focus on making things people like in collaboration with it’s clients.

“Dogsharks” was written and directed by Robert Wurzburg, Animation by Robert Wurzburg and Gahlord Dewald, Editorial Advisor was Nanette Kuehn. Music: “Tickety Boo” Written by David Martin, Composed by Scott Hartley, Arranged & Performed by Wills Bates. “Whistler” Composed and Performed by Scott Hartley, Gahlord Dewald and Robert Wurzburg. “A Dogsharks Day” Composed and Performed by Gahlord Dewald, Robert Wurzburg and Bob Wolk. “The Dogsharks Macabre: a Saint Saëns Fantasy” arranged by Gahlord Dewald and Performed by Gahlord Dewald, Peter Lewy, Bob Wolk and Robert Wurzburg.

Client Liaison between Thoughtfaucet and Dogsharks was Robert Wurzburg.

Tools: Toon Boom Animate v1, Flash CS3, Logic Express, Good Old iMovie ’08, Adobe CS4, some Macbook Pros, Wacom tablets, paper, scissors, tape and so on. The phone and the internet too.

We’ve been reading and creating a lot of chatter about “social media” for the past few years. And for the past year it’s been incessant non-stop cacophony about Twitter and Facebook and gurus and is-blogging-relevant-anymore and Foursquare and so on. Non-stop.

In all that chatter it’s been easy to miss the point of social media. The whole point of social-anything is that we all do something together. Social technologies are there to assist collaboration between people. Even if that collaboration is just to have a barbecue together.

If I had to choose whether I wanted to focus on understanding the nature of collaboration vs understanding the nature of social media I know which one I would choose.

Let’s  not confuse collaboration with the tools and tactics of social media.

A lot of my time is spent trying out and playing with new technologies to see how they might fit into my clients’ businesses. Here’s how I keep “collaboration” separate from “social media” in my work. Maybe it’ll be helpful for you. Maybe you’ve got an even better perspective (please share!).

Characteristics of social media

Social media is a specific tool or website. The metrics that are often touted as proof of a successful social media site or tool tend to be based on increasing inputs to the system: more users, more status updates, more user data input into the site. It’s not necessarily all quantitative stuff either. It could be qualitative: best users, best status updates, best user data input into the site.

What social media is typically not measured on though, is how often something really happens with all that “social” energy that is being gathered. This is why, after the algae bloom of social media gurus in the past year, we’re going to have another crop of skeptics asking a very simple question:

The thing about social media is that the goals of “media” are not always well-aligned with the needs of “social” aka “people.” People want to collaborate, but the social tools are built to generate more status updates and “active users.”

If you feel uneasy while talking about the value of social media this is probably why. Deep down many of us feel that “social” means a lot more than pumping our details into a Facebook profile.

Characteristics of collaboration

Collaboration, on the other hand, is platform-agnostic. Collaboration is two or more people working together to do or make something. Sometimes that thing they make is a barbecue or a party or even a Tweetup. Sometimes people collaborate to do business. Sometimes they collaborate to have fun. You can use Facebook to collaborate, you can use Twitter to collaborate. The world’s largest social media site, Skype, is really good for collaboration. Collaboration will continue to exist long after Facebook is placed on the shelf next to SixDegrees, long after Twitter takes it’s place next to .Plan updates.

There really isn’t a great metric for assessing the value of collaboration though. It’s not as easy as “number of eyeballs” which is, sadly, the metric that is often used for measuring anything on the web. Even after all these years.

There are attempts at calculating engagement metrics or even a return-on-engagement. But often these devolve into things like “time on site” or other things that really have nothing to do with collaboration. Looking at a website for 20 minutes doesn’t have a direct relationship to me collaborating with a real human. Could be I’m putting off collaborating with a real human by reading blog posts or worse, I’m lost in your site’s navigation.

This isn’t an anti-social media rant, I swear.

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I think social media tools and sites are great and can be used very effectively. In fact, social media sites and tools can be used to help us understand how we all work and make things together. And that’s awesome. Social media sites and tools, when used well, are a great testbed for understanding collaboration.

Value your social media tools and tactics based on how they can increase your ability to collaborate with friends, business partners, clients, client-alumnae and so on. Use your social media tools and tactics to learn about how people collaborate. If you chase eyeball-metrics, chase them in the name of increasing collaboration.

We all know that just because we find images online that we like, that we aren’t entitled to just use them. Just because it’s on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s free. If you want to use a photograph you find online for your project, you need permission from the copyright owner. If not, you’re breaking the law.

Getting permission to use a photograph can take a lot of time and, depending on how you want to use it, can be pricey as well. Stock photography is often priced based on the number of times the image is going to be seen. And online your image could be seen a lot so prices can get up there.

If you’re looking around for free images I’m assuming you don’t have the budget for a professional photograph. A good photographer can often give you exactly the image you’re looking for in a format that works for print and online work. But if you don’t have the resources available but you do have the need for a photograph, what do you do?

Creative Commons: giving permission to use work

There’s a great licensing system called the Creative Commons. This system makes it simple for photographers and other creators to give others permission to use their work. There are several flavors of Creative Commons license. If you’re looking to use a photograph as part of your business communications, you will want to find images that fall within the “by” license. This lets you use a picture as long as you give credit to the creator–a pretty fair deal if you ask me.

Now that you know there are people who really want you to use their credited work in your project, you’ll want to find the picture you’re after. For this, the Creative Commons links out to services that have CC licenses. For example, the Flickr photo sharing site has a great Creative Commons image search engine. Use that instead of the generic Google Image Search if you’re looking for images to use in your project. Might as well use images people want you to use, right? You’ll also probably notice that the images on Flickr tend to be much higher quality than you’ll find by typing “free images” into Google.

iStockPhoto: reasonably priced royalty free creative stuff

If you don’t find what you’re looking for on Flickr, the next step is to head over to iStockPhoto and open up your wallet. It’s not too pricey, but it isn’t free either. More importantly, it isn’t stealing. The iStockPhoto service is especially useful if you’re looking for specific business-concept art and photography or visual metaphor stuff. Sometimes you can ask one of their contributors to take a specific kind of shot and they’ll do it. It’s a great alternative for those who can’t commit the resources to a dedicated photo shoot.

I hope this helps you all get pretty images into your projects without worrying about stealing.

Dale Chumbley is a real estate agent in Vancouver, WA. But, since I’m not looking to buy or sell near Portland, that’s not why I follow him. And even though I do a lot of web strategy work in the real estate industry Dale isn’t a client (in fact, I should probably pay him consulting fees) so I don’t follow him for that either.

I follow Dale because he’s an awesome example of endurance and perseverance in social marketing. In any web marketing tactic that requires continued or repeated activity, Dale is there doing it to the fullest and he just doesn’t stop.

Remember those cool daily mugshot things people were trying out? Remember how people couldn’t keep doing them and gave up? Or how they just changed their clothes and background and shot them all in one day? Dale Chumbley is, as of this writing, on his 652nd mugshot. That’s tenacity.

Another example of his tenacity, is his approach to the  “365 Things to Do” meme. You’ve probably seen these pages pop up on Facebook “365 Things to Do in YourTownHere.” Lesser town curators abandon them after the fifth day or so. Dale is, as of this writing, on day 86 on his Things to Do in Vancouver WA project and I’m sure he’ll make it all the way through. Oh yeah, and he incorporates video into that as well. Once he starts stuff like this he just keeps going.

Dale does a lot of this social media marketing stuff without over-strategizing. I asked him once how long he spent planning out his 365 project, making an editorial calendar and so on. He said “I didn’t. I heard about it on a Monday and I started doing it on a Tuesday.”

What makes a lot of his stuff successful is that he knows his own work habits and is able to incorporate his social media marketing into his daily routine. For example, he does all the video for his 365 project on site, including uploading and posting. He shoots it with his iPhone, edits it with ReelDirector while sitting in his car, and then goes on with his day. Learning how Dale Chumbley does all this is the main reason I follow him.

Here’s the checklist of a few reasons you might want to follow Dale Chumbley as well:

• See an example of someone pursuing social media marketing over the long haul.
• See an example of someone integrating their marketing practices into the flow of their life/work.
• Learn about the Vancouver that isn’t in Canada.

Follow Dale Chumbley on:

• Twitter
• Clark County Real Estate Guide (including 365 Things To Do in Vancouver, WA)
• Flickr
• His mugshot

You’re redesigning your website. You’ve got a lot of webpages. Since your content is awesome and people like it, there are tons of backlinks. Your new site design is going to be a major overhaul of the information architecture, not just a simple layout and graphic design change. There’s a little voice in the back of your head whispering about SEO. This post is going to give you a checklist for doing this in a sane manner.

This post includes an in-depth review of the relationships between search engine optimization, web design and information architecture. If you just want the quick checklist, skip to the end. The background material is there because all three of the topics (SEO, design and IA) change with technology and society. It’s good to have a grasp of the foundations so you can adapt to future changes.

It’s usually better to tweak the site you have than to scrap it all and start from scratch. But sometimes a major overhaul is necessary. And getting into the details of that is a whole post unto itself. Let’s assume you’ve done the background work and you know that a major website redesign is needed. You’re switching from a static pile of HTML pages to WordPress, maybe. Or perhaps you’re changing the site architecture to reflect the needs of your customers instead of the internal structure of your organization. Whatever the reason, you’re making a big change to your website and you need to do your best to hold your search rankings.

Changing the design of your website isn’t an issue, changing the information architecture is.

When websites are redesigned usually everyone on the team is very focused on how it looks: the layout, the colors, the design-related images and so on. Changing these things usually doesn’t have a huge impact on search engine optimization. Search engines, being blind, don’t care much about what color your site is. They just read through the HTML and catalog the content.

The aspect of a website redesign that has a large impact on SEO is the site architecture. Site architecture deals with how many pages you have and how those pages are organized. During a website planning phase it’s sometimes drawn as a pseudo flowchart (I’ll hold my harsh comments about that practice for now).

For example, say you have a site with 200 pages organized into seven categories. Your new site is going to rock because it stays totally focused on a specific task. Your major site overhaul will streamline the whole thing into 25 pages with four categories. You’re psyched because the user experience is going to be much simpler and easier to follow.

Unfortunately, the search engines are bummed because they just lost 175 pages of content. Well, they’re not really bummed, search engines are just computers running math. But the point is: when search engines lose content they react–by demoting you in the rankings (if you don’t have content, why should you rank?).

Recap: changing the way your website looks shouldn’t have a big impact on your search rankings but changing the number and organization of pages can have a a big impact on your search rankings.

Onpage SEO and the website redesign

Information architecture is an aspect of onpage search engine optimization. It’s one of the things over which you have direct control. You get to decide how many pages you have on your site.

For your site redesign, another the onpage SEO things to consider is your internal linking structure. This is a fancy way of saying “On your current site, what words do you use to link pages to each other–like in your menu for example.” You’ll want to keep this in mind for your new site’s internal linking structure.

All of the other usual tactics for onpage SEO also apply to your redesign. If your old site had pages with headlines, URLs, paragraph text, image filenames, image alternative text, etc that had your keywords and your new site doesn’t… well that’s asking for trouble.

Offpage SEO and the website redesign

Aspects of SEO that are considered offpage are things like how many other sites link to you or whether people click on your link when they see it in search results. You have very limited to no control over these things. You don’t get to decide who links to your website. You don’t get to decide when people click on your link on the search engine result page.

You can do a few things here to help out. Make sure people people like your page titles and descriptions enough to click on them. How do you know what people like? Testing. Asking. The usual things. No different than normal operating procedure.

Backlinks: the SEO bugbear of the redesigned website

The biggest issue of all in the site redesign, as far as SEO is concerned, is backlinks. People who link to your site are very very unlikely to go through their own sites and update their links to your page.

When you subtract or change the web address of your pages you are potentially losing any traffic and search engine benefit from sources that link to that page. People clicking on links to those changed web addresses or missing pages get the dreaded “404 Not Found” message.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a forwarding service for web traffic? Sort of like when you change your mailing address and you go to the post office and say “Hey when you get mail for my old address in South Burlington, VT please forward it to my new address in Burlington, VT.”

There is. It’s called the “301 Permanent Redirect.” And even better, you don’t have to go to the post office to set it up. You just edit a file called .htaccess that resides on the root level of the server that has the old webpages on it (if you’re changing servers or domain names as part of your website redesign, see below). It starts with a period so if you may need to adjust your file browser to let you to view invisible files in order to see it.

A line of 301 redirects looks like this:

redirect 301 /southburlington/webpage http://yourdomain.com/burlington/webpage

Note the structure of this:

redirect 301 OldWebPage NewWebAddress

Voilá. Now all the links going to one page of your site, send traffic to a different page.

You’ll need to do this for everything on your site. Which can be a real pain. Luckily, .htaccess does GREP. So you can say things like “anything that used to be in the generic web design section should now go to the burlington web design page.”

redirect 301 /generic-web-design/* http://yourdomain/burlington-web-design.html

If your head just melted feel free to do this sort of thing the long way, just enter in every old page of your site architecture and manually hook it up to the new page in your website architecture.

Figuring out what pages you currently have on your site can be tricky. You can count them on the server if it’s a static pile of HTML. Or you could use a sitemap.xml tool to make a list. Or you could do an advanced Google search to see what pages are in Google’s index. There’s a lot of ways. No matter what you do you’ll probably miss a few.

For the few that you miss, check your web analytics for the 404 error and try to guess what page they were looking for. This should help you plug a few leaks. Also, Google Webmaster Tools can help you out. Use their “Crawl errors” tool in the “Diagnostics” section to plug up any more holes in your 301 Redirect list.

Changing servers or domain names and SEO impact

If you’re changing from one domain to another (finally giving up that old dot-biz domain and moving to a shiny new dot-com domain, for example) you may want to do a variation on .htaccess method described above. You could just do a GREP that maps everything on the old domain name to the new one and keep both machines running. But why have two domains provisioned if you don’t need to.

Use your domain tools at the DNS to forward all traffic from your old domain to the new domain. Then do all the same things mentioned above in the part on backlinks. What you want to avoid is having the exact same content at www.mygreatdomain.com and at www.mygreatdomain.org. You just want the content to show up in the new domain, and if you type in the old one get automatically redirected to the new domain.

The list for handling your site redesign with care for your SEO

Enough of all that blather. Here’s the list.

• Make a list of all the existing pages on your website.
• If you’re changing domain names, use your DNS or server admin tools to forward the domain.
• Set 301 redirects matching the most relevant new pages with the old pages of your site.
• Make sure your headlines, new images and new content accurately reflect the goals of your organization (just like you should already be doing).
• Same thing with meta-descriptions and page titles–things that get pushed out to other sites and web locations like the Google SERP or Facebook Walls.
• A little bit after launching, identify any 404 traffic that can be redirected to a relevant page.

Some closing thoughts on SEO and redesigning your website

Google and other search engines make their money by sprinkling advertisements around your content, whether it’s your page titles and descriptions on the search engine results page or ads that run in sidebars across the web. That’s their business and how they survive.

When you make changes to your content, it changes their ability to make money. Maybe you’re giving them fewer pages to sprinkle ads on. Maybe you’re giving them more. Maybe you’re taking away content that they just loved because it generated ad clicks for them. Maybe you’re adding new stuff.

When you make a change to your site, you can bet that there will be some evaluations of how that change effects the ability of search engines to make money. This is why there’s a dip or fluctuation after any changes to your content.

Remember that it isn’t personal or anything, it’s just one machine trying to figure out how to make the most money for it’s owners. The machine makes money by serving up results that are accurate enough to attract visitors who then click on ads. Keeping this in mind can be helpful as you try to anticipate and weather changes to your SERP through your redesign process.