We are planning to promote a shopping cart. The domain is already 4 years old with decent sales. But, there are lot of SEO problems with the website. The URLs and the navigation structure of the website is pretty Bad, so if any of you have already done similar project it will be great if you can share with the hurdles you have already come across. We are planning to redo the URLs. But we worry about the old pages getting de-listed. Are there any more things one need to keep in mind when handling shopping carts?
Get a website usability test done before you embark upon SEO. If the website has issue there would be no point in going after SEO. Even if you manage to get visitors they would leave because of these hurdles. If you are redoing your URLs you can always implement 301 redirect and submit the updated sitemap in Google. This way you preserve the link juice and the traffic.
I think I will need to develop a complete list of URLs those are live on the current website and then after redoing the changes, place 301 for each of those.