I've been trying to get a straight answer for this question I have. I have a static site and I want to go dynamic with it. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but haven't done for fear of losing my rank in SEs. I'm doing very well on nearly all my pages in SEs. I've been #2 in Google, Yahoo, and MSN for one of my major keywords for quite some time now. My question is this, if I change my site to a dynamic site, I keep my <h1> and <titles> the same, and do redirects to the newly created pages will this cause me to drop in the serps?
if you are able to keep the same file names and architecture of your site than it shouldnt affect your rankings.
I'm not for sure, but I don't think I will be able to keep the same file name. I will be using OScommerce.
I think these are enough to maintain your present ranking but wait... are you going to have a different content? Redirects are important so that you will not lose any old visitors, and it helps search engines as well.
You need something Search Engine Friendly (SEF). Your URLs should stay the same if you have top rankings, or shift marginally to a SEF naming convention. Some Carts do not offer the ability to do this as they have 50 million variables in the URL, making them worthless - IMHO. Those carts are NOT recommended as they have a high potential risk of causing a loss of rankings. If your rankings are needed for your business, then this would be an unwise business decision. Find a better cart/cms system that has SEF URLs or find an SEO that can implement this for you.