Every year or so, companies decide to go and update their website. Not just a few pages, but usually the entire design and structure. This can be a big factor in search engine optimization and whether it’s positive or negative depends on how you do it.

There are lots of things everyone has to keep in mind when changing websites. Most things need to be thought of before hand, not after, and any issues should be addressed before a new site goes live.

Here are five things to keep in mind.

• URLs
URLs are very important. Not only are search engines referring you traffic, but what about links from other peoples‚Äô sites, bookmarks, press releases or social bookmarking sites? You could have hundreds of links out there and you don’t want to forget about them or else your visitors may be coming to a ‘Page Not Found’ error instead of an information page.