Quite simply, when it comes to site re-design, pretty is nice, but it isn't enough. Incorporating elements into a site re-design that will help you drive traffic is a critical step you can't afford to miss. And, if you're thinking it's one way or the other -- a search friendly site OR a customer friendly site -- you're wrong. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have your cake AND eat it too.

Most websites re-launch every two years, and all too often marketers and webmasters forget to plan for SEO in the process. Later on, when the site's performance tanks, and everyone scrambles to figure out the problem, the importance of search becomes evident. Once it's identified as an SEO issue, more scrambling ensues to try to fix things. However, this backwards approach doesn't really fix anything. Instead, it just creates a band-aid solution that in the end actually keeps the site from reaching its full traffic-generating potential. To do it right, you should capitalize on the window of opportunity that your re-launch presents, as it is a rare chance to make those labor intensive changes while your developers are already touching the site.

Now you might be wondering why the re-design time is such a good opportunity to address SEO. Well to start, during the re-design process, people are usually more willing to step back and think about how they can make something better. It's a time of renewal. A re-birth of sorts. And while that sounds a little Zen-like, my experience with client after client has shown that this seemingly small step is a crucial element in the improvement process. This is the time where you can constructively look at ways to improve your search marketing performance. For example, this would be the time to make your URLs cleaner, improve internal linking, add new content, and restructure your source code.