I do most of my sites in Wordpress but have an older site that was built on a site builder (InetUSA). It actually have some good links and ranks well on some important keywords and I have been backlinking to improve further. What would the impact be of moving the site to Wordpress, it would give me more flexibility and save $40/mo but i am concerned that i may end up at square one for SEO. What is the best way to do this or is this something that would not be advised. Thanks in advance.
As for as your website url of each page does not change when you shift from InetUsa to wordpress, then its ok to shift. What i mean is some non wordpress site will have the following extension - yourdomain . com/first-post.html or and when you move to wordpress it will be yourdomain .com/first-post Wordpress has a lot of advantage and easy to manage.
So the key is to use your permalinks to map as page as closely as possible. Any concern over Google freaking out when the IP address changes?
You have to ensure the urls are the same. Moving a site is never an easy task. I have just done it myself and you will probably always meet some index casualties!
The points mentioned here are great but what happened to the 301 redirect? I thought that to move a site or a single page you always had to tell the SE that the site or page is being moved to a new location. And to do this you needed a 301 redirect.