How Do Cyclists Reach Super Fast Speeds?

Even though spoked wheels and pneumatic tyres were invented in the 1880s, bicycle design hasn’t really changed a great deal in the time since – at least, at face value. However, look closer and around a hundred years of research or development has taken the humble bicycle from boneshaker to a speed machine.

The basics

A modern bicycle is still made up of a double diamond shaped frame, two wheels with air-inflated tyres and a chain-based drivetrain – the mechanism through which the whole system runs. Though we’ve stuck to the basics, man and his machine have increased in speed from the 14.5 km per hour reportedly achieved by Karl von Drais in 1817 to a mind-blowing 55km in a Tour de France time trial nearly 200 years later.

The ability to improve speed on a bicycle comes down to two fundamental factors: you either increase the power that propels the rider forwards or you decrease the resistant forces that are holding that rider back.

The rider’s ability to produce power is generally down to their physiology and biomechanics. The resistant forces that slow a cyclist are mainly air resistance, total mass and any frictional losses, such as the drivetrain or the rolling resistance of the wheels against the ground. If every athlete has an equal chance of winning the challenge for engineers and scientists then is to focus on the technology the cyclist uses to obtain a competitive advantage.

The trouble with air

It has been demonstrated that once a cyclist travelling outdoors gets past speeds of 25 miles per hour, around 90% of the force holding them back will be air resistance. But the relationship between speed and air resistance is not a linear one. It can, for example, take twice as much human power to ride a bicycle at 30 miles an hour as it does at 20 miles an hour.

As a result, reducing air resistance has become a top priority in professional cycling technology in recent times. At the London 2012 Olympic Games, Team GB’s track riders were using bikes, helmets and clothing solely designed to help contribute to the optimisation of each rider’s aerodynamics. Team principal, David Brailsford, has referred to this process as the “aggregation of marginal gains”.

To achieve this, wind tunnels are now used by both professional and amateur athletes to analyse the aerodynamic drag, then work out how to get the rider and machine working together optimally. There is a complication in this process, though, in that the best aerodynamic solution is typically specific to every rider, so each needs to make individual choices about their helmet and bicycle and especially their riding position.

The second problem is that wind tunnels are few and far between and are by no means cheap to access. Thankfully, alternatives for those without an Olympic-sized budget are emerging. You can now use computational fluid dynamic software which can be, in essence, a virtual wind tunnel. This software allows an engineer to simulate a variety of air flow conditions on a new bicycle design, therefore cutting down the time and costs of prototyping and testing. There is now also published research which allows riders to assess their aerodynamics out in the field rather than in a wind tunnel.

Mark Cavendish famously won his Tour de France world title in 2011 wearing a skin suit and an aerodynamic helmet while the majority of his competitors were still wearing baggier jerseys and heavily vented helmets. Team GB had realised that even though a rider may be sheltered by 200 others during a road stage, when Cavendish sprints for the finish line, he is alone in undisturbed air for around 200 metres at speeds well above 40 miles an hour. Every small advantage at this point converts into winning millimetres.

Tinkering with the tech

Racing bicycles themselves have been subject to a tremendous amount of aerodynamic refinement over the last five years. Braking systems have been positioned so as to be sheltered from the main airflow and gear cables are now run on the inside of the frame. Wheel designs have not only improved in reducing aerodynamic drag, but are now being optimised to provide benefits such as increased rider stability from crosswinds. Innovations like these have traditionally been directed towards making better bikes for either time trials or triathlons but is now spreading towards the road bikes used in mass start racing.

The mechanical properties of the racing bicycle have also evolved. Like computational fluid dynamic software, finite element analysis allows us to optimise the design of bike components to simulate the stresses and strains that they will face when in use. This has allowed us to develop composite frames that weigh as little as 800g but are still stiff enough to sprint for a stage win and comfortable enough to be ridden for five hours or more, day after day.

Even the humble gear derailleur, relatively unchanged in principle since its original invention in 1951 has lately begun to shape shift. The most advanced systems are now electronically powered and triggered. This has allowed for smooth gear changes requiring only thin wires and a small battery as opposed to having a frame design compromised by the limitations of needing cable runs for mechanically actuated gears.

All these improvements have enabled us to morph the humble bicycle into a speed machine without tampering with its basic design. So where does this all lead next? In competitive sport, the technology is typically regulated by its governing body. In the case of cycling, this means that the equipment is currently limited in both its size, nature and weight, so we are more likely to see more incremental improvements than a radical shift away from the bikes we use now.

The average leisure cyclist is not limited by such constraints allowing us to benefit from any level of innovation. For example, if you look at bicycle land-speed records, recumbent cycles – which are unique in the way they position the rider lying down – can move at far higher speeds than a conventional bicycle. And for enthusiastic amateurs, new bicycle designs are continuing to become lighter, faster and ultimately more efficient. Anything could happen.

"Indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks" continue in Syria

Violence against civilians is continuing in Syria despite a UN Security Council resolution calling for increased and unhindered humanitarian access.

On Friday, the Council discussed a report of the UN Secretary-General which said that "indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks" have caused mass civilian death and injuries, as well as forced displacement.

The attacks included aerial bombings, and the targeting of civilians with barrel bombs.

The British Ambassador to the UN, Mark Lyall Grant said there had been little progress since the adoption of the Security Council resolution.

"Five weeks on and against whichever benchmarks you use, it is clear that we have not seen the step change required. And the Syrian government is front and center in bearing the overwhelming responsibility for this lack of response. The regime's use of barrel bombs continues unabated with devastating impact on civilians with a daily death toll now of more than 200."  (26″)

The Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar Ja'afari urged the international community to work constructively with his Government.

"We are a member state, full pledged member state of this organization. We are a government. These people should be responsible and deal with the Syrian government. We need their cooperation, their cooperation, not their complicity, and their assistance with the terrorist groups." (15″)

According to the report, 9.3 million Syrians are currently in need of humanitarian aid, with 3.5 million of them living in hard to reach areas.

3 Tips To Find New Long Tail Keywords on AdWords

Ranking well for competitive keywords is exceptionally hard for undersized business. That's why more specific and less competitive keywords can make a huge difference in the success of a small business. Also, long tail and more specific keywords will help you to target people that are at a later stage of the sales funnel.

A long-tail keyword could be the title and topic for an exceedingly targeted blog post or article or video, infographic. A long-tail keyword could also be the name of a specific advertising technique or the code that identifies a given product.

We can define a long tail keyword as a keyword (or, rather, a search that has been made on the internet) which is really definite to something that the searcher is looking for. They do generally have lower search volumes, which implies that there's less traffic available to a page optimizing for them, but there's also less competition for those keywords, so it's easier to rank for them.

If you're running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, long-tail keywords are usually a lot less expensive. The key, of course, is to identify the best long-tail keywords for your business

The long tail of keyword research is fundamental to your online success. That's really important, so I'll say it again. The long tail of keyword research is fundamental to your online success.

Here’s how to generate long tail keywords on your site to benefit your customers, improve conversions, and boost your visibility in search results.

Use Google Suggestions

Google Suggestions can be a great starting place for long-tail keyword variations. Plainly begin typing your primary keyword into the Google search box and check out the variations Google suggests. When you do a search, Google gives you a number of suggestions for different keyword phrases. These suggestions are based on other users’ behavior and can give you some really good ideas for potentially valuable long-tail phrases. Google does a great job already on amassing most popular searches, and will give you an idea about what you are thinking before you can even draw to a close.

Long-tail keywords that Google recommends are phrases people in point of fact search for. You may not want to make use of them all however you will get a good suggestion of which search terms are trendy. You'll absolutely come across some astonishing suggestions.

Keyword Planner
 

The Keyword Planner has had more than a few developments by growing further than head terms. No one technique is better than the other, but a good place to start is the Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, or your own keyword list, if you already have one. The best recommendation is to enter whatsoever your main keywords are in order to come across other variations, and sort these out according to competition to discover those that have small to medium competition. These can provide you an excellent insight into what keywords you can use with low to medium competition, so you can take advantage of keywords that are not being used by your competition.

Use a Variety of Keyword Research Tools

If you solely utilize one keyword tool consistently while you perform keyword research, you're restricting your own self and probably missing out on plenty of long-tail keyword variations. The Google Keyword Tool is a great basic tool and a good place to start, but if you're looking for more long-tail keywords there are many other solutions available. The more keyword tools you confer with the more long-tail keyword variations you're likely to discover.

Time and again, long-tail keywords have small to no search volume according to Google’s Keyword Tool. On the other hand, they can still heave fairly an amount of traffic. It’s a bit of a trial and error, which is why it’s easier said than done to go plainly by the numbers when it comes to long-tail keyword research. Write your content around your long-tail keywords, and most significantly, consider and tackle user intent.

In Conclusion

These are a few of the things that ought to help you in recognizing advantageous long-tail keywords that will not just assist you rank higher, but in addition convert better. Find out more ways to find long tail keywords and work on

As with other keywords and their related content strategies, selecting the right set of long-tail keywords doesn’t promise you traffic or rankings right away; it’s a long-term time dedication that should be treated as an investment. With sufficient time and steadiness, your keyword research and content strategy will pay off.

Info presented by Rankwinz

Quantum Leap: New Tech Could Make Perfectly Secure Communications

Quantum cryptography could provide unbreakable security in the near future, perhaps in the next few years, researchers argue.

The technology relies on quantum mechanics, the laws of nature that govern the behavior of tiny subatomic particles, to ensure that eavesdroppers can't snoop on secure messages without being detected.

These systems can produce perfectly secure communications and unbreakable codes, even when the devices producing the quantum cryptography are somewhat unreliable or have been hacked by a malicious outsider. To achieve perfect security, users would only have to ensure these devices pass a statistical test before using them, according to a perspectives article published today (March 26) in the journal Nature.

Difficult puzzles

Cryptography relies on the idea of a sender and receiver sharing a secret key. As far back as 400 B.C., the Spartan military commanders used a device called a scytale to write messages on strips of paper twirled around a baton; the messages could be decoded only when wrapped around the right-sized baton.

Modern cryptography, such as the Web-standard RSA encryption, relies on keys created by multiplying two gigantic prime numbers together. To break the code, a hacker would need to know the prime factors of the key, which are incredibly difficult to calculate.

But with enough computational brute strength, these factors could be calculated. And if someone one day figures out a way to calculate prime factors easily, it would render RSA encryption insecure.

Quantum entanglement

Perfectly unbreakable code would rely on a one-time pad.

In this system, a completely secret, random number is used to encrypt a message, and the key is then destroyed after the message is read. As long as the key is never reused, these codes could never be cracked. The trouble is, how does the sender get the key to the receiver without someone eavesdropping?

The answer is to send keys that rely on quantum mechanics. When a particle of light, or a photon, travels from one position to another, it travels in an indeterminate orientation or polarization that is altered as soon as someone tries to measure it. So if a key was encoded via entangled quantum particles, there is no way to eavesdrop on the key without changing it, making it immediately obvious to both sender and receiver.

"This is based not on the difficulty of certain mathematical problems but on the laws of physics," said article co-author Artur Ekert, a cryptologist at the University of Oxford in England and the National University of Singapore. "We as humans do not have any influence on the laws of physics."

New breakthrough

Quantum cryptography devices are already on the market. Until now, however, researchers thought these systems would only work if the devices that generated the encryption were completely reliable: if the makers botch the production, the devices could still theoretically be hacked. But research in the past few years by Ekert and co-author Renato Renner, a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Switzerland, as well as others, showed that even shoddy devices infiltrated by enemies could still produce perfect encryption.

The only requirement is that the random numbers generated for the one-time pad are truly random and that there is some quantum entanglement in the device, which can be determined by running a statistical test, Ekert said.

That means perfect security could be within reach for people beyond the NSA and other governments. Even if a snooper inserted a tracking chip into an encryption device or tried to weaken the encryption in other ways, it could still provide perfect security, as long as the devices themselves were kept in secure locations and passed a statistical test. "Even if you don't know the internal working of the device or don't trust the provider, as long as that device generates certain kinds of correlations, then it's okay," Ekert told Live Science. "There's no way to insert Trojan horses or any sorts of devices that would spy on you."

The new theoretical breakthrough means secure quantum encryption isn't too far off. "One can easily say that within a few years this technology will be available," Ekert said.

Happiness at work

Change the way you think to be happy at work.

Happiness at work is an emotion – an internal state. You feel it or you don’t. In any case, it’s inside of you. While it is certainly affected by what goes on around you (like when some inconsiderate jerk takes the last coffee and doesn’t make a new pot) it mostly relies on what goes on inside your head. The old “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it” applies here as well.

And that’s why we must change our thinking about work. There are some traditional perceptions, ideas and maxims that are holding us back from achieving truly fulfilling and happy work lives. Many people and workplaces focus all their efforts on changing the external circumstances at work – stuff like salaries, bonuses, promotions, careers, perks, etc…

So we need to pay more attention to our internal mental processes around happiness at work and change our thinking on some key points.

Here are the most important ones:

From “Work is tough” to “Work is fun”

For the last 200 years, all through the industrial age, work has been perceived as tough, unpleasant and hard. In fact, that’s why we get paid. And for most of the industrial age, this was mostly true, with many jobs being hard, boring or even dangerous.

Today, this is less and less so and there are many, many more interesting, creative, fun, pleasant and happy workplaces to choose from. But none of this will matter if we go on expecting work to be hard and rough – for the simple fact that we tend to get what we expect. Therefore we must change our thinking, and start expecting work to be fun.

From “You can’t be happy and successful” to “You can only be really successful if you’re happy”

What is business success worth, if you’re not happy? I have seen successful business people break down crying over the realization that they have wasted large parts of their lives chasing money, fame and success - while never being happy themselves. It makes zero sense to sacrifice your happiness at work for success. It’s just not worth it.

From “Success requires hard work” to “Success requires happiness”

Interestingly, you don’t need to give up on success in order to be happy. Studies show that happy people are more likely to be successful! Which is hardly surprising when you remember that people who are happy at work are also more motivated, energetic, likable, creative and productive.

From “Happiness at work is nearly impossible” to “Happiness at work is easy”

Everything we need to create happy workplaces is easy to get and readily available to almost any workplace in the world. It’s not about budgets, mission statements, strategies or corporate policies. Happiness at work comes from the simple things. From the things “you and I do here and now”. Anyone can do it!

From “Happiness at work is trivial” to “Happiness at work is crucial”

Happiness at work is not a trivial little detail that we can leave to an overworked HR department to maybe do something about. It’s not a side issue to address once you’ve achieved the right salary, title and company car. Happiness at work is crucial to your health, success and general happiness in life and it’s the #1 factor that drives corporate success.

That’s why happiness at work needs to be at the very top of our priorities - both for employees and businesses. So considering the fact that happiness at work is crucial, easy and really, really good for you… My question is: Are you happy or unhappy at work? Is your workplace happy or unhappy? How does this affect you? And if your workplace is not happy, what would be different if you and most of your co-workers liked your jobs so much that you looked forward to going to work almost every morning? What would that do for you and for the company?

Why Should UGC be a Part of Your SEO Strategy?

It is no secret–fresh and engaging content is the lifeblood of any successful website. It drives traffic, promotes conversions, and provides searchable material for Google and other search engines to scan and evaluate. Without a steady flow of new content the Internet would virtually grind to a halt. But creating new and engaging content takes time and effort, and SEOs and webmasters are constantly on the look out for new ways to bring rich content to their sites.

User generated content (UGC) provides one solution to the ongoing search for new content. UGC not only provides a steady stream of rich, searchable content for a given website, it also helps to keep webmasters and SEOs informed on the trending topics that their customer base finds most interesting. But just what is user-generated content, and how can it play a part in your SEO strategy?

What Do We Mean By User Generated Content?

User-generated content is, quite simply, any content that is created and submitted by your website visitors. It might be a blog comment, a product review, an uploaded image, social networking updates, or other ideas. We see user-generated content everyday, particularly on e-commerce sites, and we tend to take it for granted. But UGC can actually play a significant part in a business’ SEO campaign.

UGC Provides Unique Content for Your Website

Search engines thrive on a steady stream of unique, searchable content. This can be particularly problematic for e-commerce sites whose product descriptions are likely to be blocks of boiler-plate text provided by the manufacturer. These product descriptions are, more often than not, identical across a number of different online retailers and a clear violation of Google’s Panda update. This gives the search engine bots very little material to work with when they crawl a website looking for information to incorporate into their page ranking algorithms.

User generated content, such as product reviews and customer testimonials, give the search engine spiders the content they need to properly evaluate a website. Moreover, that user-generated content tells the search engine that your site is active, and providing a valuable service to online customers. That factor alone can set your website apart from those sites that may not be open to user’s comments, reviews, and testimonials.

UGC Is a Great Source for Long Tail Keywords

Allowing visitors to your site to leave comments, post reviews, upload images, and participate in forum discussions, gives you the opportunity to see exactly how consumers are talking about your products and services. This can be invaluable when researching keywords and phrases for your SEO campaign. By looking at the language your customers use, and the phrases that get repeated across a number of different postings, you will be able to identify new long tail keywords that will be invaluable in your on-page optimization strategies.

UGC as a Source for Your Own Content

One of the biggest challenges facing webmasters and SEOs is creating their own stream of unique content for their websites. User generated content provides a great source for blog topics. By monitoring the UGC on your websites, you can get a good idea of what your customer base is talking about, what questions they may have about your products and services, as well as related concerns they may have with your industry in general. This is a rich vein of information that can be mined for blog topics that will be timely and address the specific interests of your customer base.

UGC Allows You to Interact With Your Customers

This is another area that is particularly important for e-commerce sites. Enabling reviews, testimonials, and customer forums may be a great way to generate content for your site, but they should be closely monitored. If a customer has an issue with your service, or a complaint about a product, other customers will judge you according to how well you deal with the complaint. So be quick and courteous in your replies. It is also important to use a strong spam filter on your site to avoid getting a flood of spammy content. Search engines hate spam as much as potential customers, and you want to minimize its occurrence as much as possible.

Advanced UGC & Tips to Really Shine

If you really think about it, every major platform is UGC based. This includes everything from blog sites, like Search Engine Journal, to major social sites like Flickr and Instagram. It’s all user-generated content. So, how can these sites help you think outside the box?

Our team has been developing an auto glass repair site for a few years now. Recently, we launched a new feature on the quoting process where the visitor can upload a picture of their broken glass for a discount on service. We used the year, make, model, and part name of the image to generate the image name and alt tag. We then placed the image in strategic areas of the site. I’m sure your niche has a solution to create UGC to increase your SEO beyond product reviews and blog comments. Other ideas might be to create user profiles on your site or build an embeddable widget for your fans to share, possibly with tabbed content of some sort.

Search engines thrive on a steady stream of unique content, but it can be difficult for SEOs and webmasters to continually feed that need. User-generated content is one way to produce a steady flow of unique content, making your website more attractive to both customers and search engine bots. Opening up your website to user-generated content will not only contribute to your SEO strategy, it will ultimately help you better connect with the visitors to your site, building brand loyalty and online success.

Info presented by Rankwinz

Food wonderlands of the world

Step into a delicious reality with these fantastic food fantasylands, a dreamy world of candy apples, whirling spices and chocolate chip cookie dough.

Chandni Chowk, India

Graze through the sweets and savouries of Chandni Chowk, a 350-year-old bazaar in Delhi, attached to the Red Fort of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. Crunch into a buttery, pistachioed sohan halwa dessert, then mix it up by downing a cone of spicy fried potato sticks. Vendors sell mounds of masalas (spice mixes), tubs of paneer (fresh cheese), towers of mangos and bins of candied fruits. Thirsty from bargaining over the din? Quench with a thandai, a milk, sugar, almond, cardamom and crushed ice concoction. When you are ready to burst, wave down a rickshaw to wheel you home.

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory, US

You can pretend you are on the tour to learn about the company’s socially responsible business practices (they use only natural ingredients, bought from local family farms). But we all know you are really at this Vermont factory for the dreamy ice-cream samples swirled with fudge chunks, toffee bars, brownie batter and chocolate chip cookie dough. Would it not be the world’s greatest job to ensure quality control of the 55-gallon fudge tank or proper blending of the peanut butter-filled pretzels into their vanilla malt base? Ice-cream fanatics have been known to weep onsite.

Yeliseyevsky, Russia

Fit for hungry tsars, this grand 1901 St Petersburg food hall drips with crystal chandeliers and Art Nouveau stained-glass windows, with plenty of gold and marble tossed in for good measure. The edibles and drinkables are even more opulent. Beluga caviar and champagne? Check. Smoked salmon and vodka? Yes. Siberian meat dumplings and cognac? Got it. Salamis, cheeses and more vodka? Here! And what about dessert, say jam-filled gingerbread and Belgian chocolates? Yeliseyevsky has it all.

Paseo de la Princesa, Puerto Rico

Energetic kids, amorous couples and old men clacking dominoes get their fill along this San Juan promenade, which runs beneath moss-draped walls. Food carts with coloured awnings proffer candy apples, cotton candy and other sugar-fuelled sweets to young ones, while older gents sip rich coffee and eat golden fried, seafood-stuffed yucca dough at outdoor tables. Cold drinks are the paseo’s specialty, with locals trying to beat the heat by gulping fruit-sweetened shaved ice, pineapple-juice-and-coconut-milk piña coladas (sans rum) and maví, a tree-bark cider served frosty from wooden barrels.

Hershey’s Chocolate World, US

Yes, it is geared mostly to youngsters with its animated films of singing Hershey Bars and Reese’s Cups wearing top hats, but adults also have ample opportunity to act like kids in the candy shop. Chocolate World is, after all, a Pennsylvanian tribute to the making of some of America’s finest sweets – crisp wafery Kit Kats, tooth-destroying caramel Milk Duds, cool tingling Peppermint Patties and roast peanut-infused NutRageous bars. The pièce de résistance for chocoholics is gaping at shelves of 5lb Hershey Bars in the onsite chocolate emporium.

Mercado de la Merced, Mexico

Those who elbow through this cramped, four-block marketplace in Mexico City are rewarded with tastes from all over the country. Traditional eats include nopales, dark and chewy cactus paddles, normally eaten raw or cooked in stew; fresh white cheese; and an array of atomically hot chillies – all of which vendors generously offer in samples. In addition to explosive flavours, multi-hued piñatas and bright wool blankets dangling from the stalls ignite the Mercado in a festival of colours.

Spice Museum, Germany

The scent tickles your nose as soon as you enter this Hamburg establishment. It is sweet, peppery, astringent and liquorice-like all at once. As you step over creaking floorboards and approach the burlap bags scattered throughout the warehouse, the aromas begin to focus. First marjoram, mint and nutmeg, then cinnamon, sage and fennel. The olfactory paradise continues, with 50 different spices to sniff, along with exhibits explaining five centuries of spice history. The aphrodisiac spices (cloves and coriander) make for particularly good inhaling.

Tsukiji Fish Market, Japan

The smell is not so fresh at Tokyo’s fish market, but the flurry of commerce, led by the 5:30 am tuna auction, is a sight to behold. Heaps of big fat slippery blackfin, bluefin, bigeye and longtail tuna, some weighing 300kg, lie on rows of ice alongside poisonous blowfish, scallops and sea cucumbers. Motorised carts whiz down the aisles, workers scurry around with clipboards and seafood-stuffed cartons, band saws hack through the giant tuna, and the slicing, scaling and sectioning of fish carries on apace. Once you have seen it, go eat it at the sushi bars along the market’s edges.

Mustard Museum, US

It is a teeny building in the tiny Wisconsin town of Mount Horeb, but it packs more mustard than you can shake a ballpark’s worth of hot dogs at – 4,600 jars, to be exact. There is horseradish mustard that will singe your nose hair, orange rind and espresso mustard that will wake up your corned beef sandwich and sweet, bubbly champagne mustard that will make your pork chop giggle. Antique tins and other items of great mustard historical importance line the shelves. “Condiment counsellors” spread samples at the back mustard bar.

5 Steps to Execute a Site Redesign without Compromising SEO

You've spent years investing in SEO, and now your company dominates the rankings, but your site is outdated, isn't mobile-friendly, and you know it's time for a redesign. You've heard all the horror stories of how a site redesign can kill rankings, so you've held off as long as you can, but now it's time.

Here are five steps to ensure that you are able to successfully execute your site redesign without compromising months or possibly years of investment in SEO.

Step 1: Evaluate Your SEO Strategy

A site redesign is the perfect time to evaluate your SEO strategy and figure out which keywords and landing pages are providing the most value, and which ones are providing the least. This will allow you to know which keywords and landing pages to prioritize during the redesign.

During this process, you may find keywords that rank well, but perform poorly at delivering quality traffic. These keywords may not be worth including in your post-redesign SEO efforts, which presents a great opportunity to refine the keywords you're targeting to ones that will drive higher quality traffic to the site.

When evaluating your SEO strategy, you may also find that certain landing pages fail to engage visitors and convert them into leads or sales. A site redesign presents the perfect opportunity to address page level engagement and conversion issues as well.

Ironically, by evaluating your SEO efforts prior to a site redesign, and addressing issues that you may have otherwise overlooked, you can actually end up with a better performing SEO campaign after the redesign.

Step 2: Keep the Same URL Structure or Implement 301 Redirects

As it pertains to SEO, it is ideal to maintain the same URL structure when executing a site redesign, but this not always practical. You may be moving the site to a new platform that requires a different URL structure, or you may have reorganized your content, which resulted in changes to the URL structure. In any case where changes to the URL structure are necessary, implementing page level 301 redirects is a necessity.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It helps retain rankings by guiding search engines from the old URL to the new URL where the requested content now lives. 301 redirects also preserve inbound links and internal links, both of which also help retain rankings.

Retaining a positive user-experience is just as important as retaining good rankings. By preserving inbound links and internal links, 301 redirects prevent visitors from being greeted with a "404 Not Found" error message when accessing the site through inbound links or navigating the site through internal links that point to URLs which no longer exist.

Step 3: Maintain On-Page Optimization

Maintaining on-page optimization is an obvious step, but a site redesign can often involve moving, revising, and adding new content, so with all these moving parts it's easy to forget the basics.

Use this as an opportunity to not only maintain, but to improve on-page optimization, beginning with making sure any keyword changes that were made in step 1 are incorporated into the appropriate pages.

Then, review each title and description tag. Make sure they're unique for each page, incorporate the target keyword(s) for that page, and accurately describe the content they're associated with.

Review the site's URLs, and make sure they're optimized for each page. Also, check for broken internal links, and review all anchor text to make sure it is consistent with any keyword changes that were made in step 1.

Step 4: Create HTML and XML Sitemaps

Create HTML and XML sitemaps to help search engines discover any new content and existing content that has moved to new URLs. HTML sitemaps are also useful to site visitors, and help them discover new content or existing content that has been moved as well.

After creating an XML sitemap, be sure to submit it to the major search engines to expedite the crawling of any new or moved content. This step, combined with page level 301 redirects will ensure efficient crawling and indexing of new or moved content.

Step 5: Monitor, Measure, Improve

Once the redesigned site goes live, carefully monitor your rankings and traffic data.

·         Are rankings improving or getting worse?

·         Is traffic to the site increasing or decreasing?

·         Are visitors engaging more or less with the site's content?

·         Are visitors converting at a higher or lower rate?

A site redesign should not be a once and done project. Just like any other marketing effort, the results of your redesign should be monitored, measured, and improved over time.

Conclusion

By following these five steps, you can not only successfully redesign your website without compromising SEO efforts, but can use it as an opportunity to make your SEO strategy even better.

Info presented by Rankwinz