Updating Homepage. Will it affect search rankings?

I am giving my home page a face lift with new images, colors, and designs. The structure will mostly be the same. Content is changed a bit, but the keyword density and prominence is about the same. Meta tags will be the same.

My site already ranks in the top 5 for the keywords that I care about. Could there be any effect on my rankings when I switch the old site for the new site? Is there anything else that I should be aware of before making the update?

Lastly, one new feature will be a small blog section at the bottom of the new site. It will just display the blog topic and the first few lines of the blog, with a link going to our blog page. The content of this will change every few weeks as we write and add newer blogs. Could this feature affect the rankings at all?

Thanks for the help.

Depends on how long its been indexed for and how often its crawled.

Your site could or couldn't be affected, it's hard to say without us being the ones working at google making the algorithm

But if all your stuff is pretty much the same then you should be fine. If you didn't change everything on the site completely then you shouldn't see to much of a fluctuation in the SERPs.

You will move about a bit.I've done it,I dropped for around a week then went straight back to where I was.Try and keep the headers\description etc the same.

Keep your Title, H1 Tag the same to help minimize the effects of the site changes.

Anytime you make changes to your site you run the risk of changing your Ranking.

maybe you will lose your position maybe not . Anyway will be only google dance

Your rankings may be affected, but that will be just temporary..

Just keep linking and your site will get back again (If it even dropped) and it may be even an opportunity to a higher rank

GOOD LUCK MAN !

Keep me updated on this! I am at #1 but need to change my home content in a bad way...just kinda scared to do it lol.

Thanks for the advice. bigballin6161, I'll let you know what happens. Probably will make the change sometime next month.

depends ... if your website is new ,you might see some dropping then back to normal if it is established then it will have no effect.
Thisis according to my observation on my blogs

Thanks for the advice. Just thought I'd give you an update on what happened.

Before the change I was ranked #2 and #4 for my two top keywords (wikipedia is#1 for both).

Changed the site over last week, making sure to match the tags from the old site, and to keep as much content as similar as possible. My site is now #3 for both keywords. So went up one and down one this week.

Will update this page again in a few weeks with where my rankings end up.