Mike, if the only thing you’re changing is the look and feel — the color scheme, the pretty pictures, that sort of thing — there shouldn’t be any effect on rankings. Search engines spiders are essentially “blind.” I often tell people to look at the text-only cache of their pages in Google to see how they look to the spiders.

If, when the design is done, the text-only cache “looks” pretty much the same as before, you should be OK.

But if you change anything that likely counts toward rankings — the anchor text of internal navigation links, the overall site architecture, any of the on-page text, alt attributes of images (especially if those images are also links), etc. — then there could very well be an effect on rankings.

So, you must constantly monitor all that things (SERP, error logs, statistics) after uploading a new design to server.

Overall, I agree with your points, Diane. Thank you for the useful checklist.

Re-designing can be pain full some times if you loose the link popularity and page rank. 301 redirect method is very help full to easily overcome this situations.

Those are good tips aswell Diane, especially researching real-world keywords, I try to tell clients to use common sense when deciding on keywords – what would an average person search for?