We have a 1700 page static, HTML site that needs to be converted to a dynamic site. This site is very old (launched in 1995) and ranks very well for thousands of competitive keywords, some of which are extremely competitive. For instance, it ranks on the first page in Google, Yahoo, and Live for one keyword that gets over 13 million searches a month. And it ranks on the first page for several other million+ search per month keywords. Obviously it is absolutely imperative that we not lose or hurt these rankings after the switch to a dynamic site. I need to find out the process to go about changing a static to a dynamic site that is as SEO friendly as possible. Is there an authoritative guide for doing this? How do I do this? I understand mod-Rewrite is involved, but how so? I need a step-by-step process to make this conversion and retain our rankings.
You will want to keep your url structure and filenames exactly the same to retain your rankings. Ideally the content would all stay the same too. Google '.htaccess mod-rewrite' or something similar. You should be able to find a pretty good tutorial that will explain how to code a .htaccess file to rewrite your urls. For a large website it may take a while to write the code for this file to rewrite all of your urls. You need to order all of the rewrite rules so that none of the rules overwrites another.
I would say - leave the old content "As-is"... if it ain't broken don't fix it... build a new content management system that adds the new content... but if you start playing with the structure - you may loose some of the words. I second the recommendation above my reply -you need to keep same URL's for all existing pages, and also page structure, meta tag and content. Uri
Is it necessary that you convert the existing content to a CMS? Because if you don't want to do that then you could just use a CMS for new content and let your existing content remain as it is. I believe you can do this with drupal quite easily. Of your existing content only your frontpage will be changed but you can easily customize that in drupal. You just install drupal in your site's main dir and develop a new frontpage. Your existing content will still be accessible via old links. Of course you could also convert all existing content to the drupal too. You will have full control over the URL structure with drupal .
Thanks for your comment. We plan on keeping the URL structure the same. I thought mod_rewrite was for redirecting URLs. If we are going to keep the URLs the same, than why would we need to use mod-rewrite?