I have had the fortune of fixing companies misfortunes after they have completed a website relaunch without the understanding of how to make sure they don’t lose placement in search engines.

Here are some simple things you need to do without being crazy technical to make sure you don’t lose your SEO value during a website relaunch.

1. To start and top on the list of importance is to make sure you map the old pages to new the pages using 301 redirects. (note: 301 redirects are the only redirect that will keep your backlink SEO value in place.) Learn how to create 301 Redirects

2. Carry over the titles and descriptions.

3. Make sure the alternate text for the images are in in tact.

4. Create a custom 404 error page that will help point people in the right direction should they come to a page that no longer exists. ( here’s how to create a 404 custom page in WordPress)

5. Carry over the html sitemap.

6. Don’t forget the footer links as these are usually optimized for SEO.

7. Make sure your site was built in a way that can be read by search engines. There are still lots of web development techniques that block search engines from indexing your website.

8. A common issue I want to mention, becuase it has came accross my path many times is that WordPress developers commonly have the privacy checkbox turn on during testing and development and forget to turn it off when they launch. With privacy turned on it generates a meta tag called noindex nofollow. This tag will block your website from search engines that are still reading meta elements. You can turn that off by going to your settings>privacy and you will see the check box you need to choose.

Lastly, make sure your Analytic tracking code is placed on the new site. This is not going to create a problem with being indexed into search engines, but it will create problems for your SEO campaign.  Analytic s are the measuring stick for success. Developers in general don’t think much about analytic tracking data so make sure you tell your developer to take care of this before the new launch.

With these 8 things in place you can be assured that you will stay in place in the search engines during a relaunch. As a reminder, this is a basic list of some key fundamentals for beginners. There are many more things that can be done for optimal success, but these will assure that your relaunch will carry over with little to no loss in SEO value. (For a more technical blow by blow look at how this works, check out this developers cheat sheet from SEOmoz)