Hello, I have a small website that was created using JSP, although it just have pages with fairly static contents. This have a lot of inconveniences, so I'm thinking of moving it to a CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla for easy maintenance. Thing is, the website right now have a pretty good ranking on the topics I need, so I'm somehow hesitant to make the change. Question is: if I keep the same domain, URL format, keywords, graphic design and such; but just move the contents to a CMS, will my SEO rank suffer? I have experience in web development, and common sense tell me it shouldn't be a problem because the site would look very similar to search engines. But, since I have little experience with SEO, I'm very much interested in your expert opinions. Many many thanks
CMS has a HUGE effect on ranking. Wordpress and html sites are often king because of structure and crawling by google. I would move it, and just use the proper plugins and permalinks so your url structure is correct and no duplicate content is produced. Good luck! B
If there are no change in the URL silo, you shouldn't expect a ranking drop! Unless you remove pages or fully change content!
CMS changing may effect your current ranking because now a days WordPress is most popular CMS that gives quick search engine results.
If you keep everything intact especially the url structure and the semantic layout (as you said) then moving to some CMS may somewhat help in boosting your site ranks or traffic.