Want to build a new website, but worried you'll lose your hard-earned pagerank after you launch? Have you heard horror stories of companies losing hundreds of leads every month after launching a new website because they lost their search engine credit with a new site?

Without a highly-skilled web development company looking out for SEO when launching a new site, you might actually be doing your internet marketing efforts more harm than good with a new site launch. After all, how good is a new site if no one is looking at it? Here are my top tips for keeping your search engine credit when you're launching a new website.

1. Create a list of all existing site URLs, and redirect all existing URLs to new URLs. Using a 301 redirect, redirect your existing site pages. The key here is ensuring that your users (and search engines) don't see 404 errors when you're moving to a new site. Don't move your entire site at once; test one subdomain at a time to make sure your new site pages appear in search engine results.
2. Conduct a comprehensive SEO analysis of your current site, and figure out why your current site is (or isn't) being found through search engine results. Optimize your new site before you launch. Analyze your site's current keyword usage and frequency, use of page titles, alt text, number of links going to your site, meta information, etc. When launching your new site, make sure you can do the same (or better) on your SEO efforts immediately after launch.
3. Create a new sitemap, and submit the new sitemap to search engines. This step will let search engines know that you've got a new site.
4. Check all internal and external links to your site. Contact the webmaster for all external links going to your site, and have them redirected to your new URLs if possible. Ensure all internal links now go to your new site URLs.
5. Test and review all links post-launch. Do a manual review of your site post-launch and check all internal links. Review crawl errors weekly to ensure that your 301 redirects are working correctly, and look out for 404 errors.

One of the richest areas of your site to beef up your SEO is in your URLs. Search Engine Friendly, or SEF, URLs contain words in the URL instead of ID numbers or other information that is useless to human readers. For example, see the URL for this blog post; it contains the same words as the title of this post.

Use URLs that are accurately descriptive and keyword-rich. Use only alphanumeric characters, and a small set of other allowable characters such as dashes or underscores. Use dashes as a separator, in place of spaces or other special characters; "contact-us.html" is better than "contactus.html". URLs should also refrain from becoming too long; one good rule of thumb is to try to keep your complete URL visible in the browser bar at once. Most CMSs like Joomla and WordPress will create SEF URLs for you automatically. If you must do it manually, you may need to get familiar with .htaccess files, if you haven't already.

Search Engine Friendly URLs will add a lot of value to your site's SEO; Google gives it the utmost regard. Many times URLs are used as anchor text, which increases the value of incoming links. SEF URLs also are more descriptive to human readers and help with clickthrough rates. If you decide to upgrade your existing URLs, be sure to update your broken links and update your sitemap!