replacing old site - SEO considerations?

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by jbourne84, Jun 7, 2013.

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  1. #1
    I am replacing our old HTML site with a newer wordpress site, it will be using the same domain name once its done.
    this is our current (old) site: http://bournece.com/

    As i work on our new site one of the things my boss mentioned was that they get a good amount of phone calls from people who found our site online. Its a waterfront engineering firm so we're assuming they are searching some relevant keywords and google is finding us with them.
    Other than page content, since that will mostly be the same, what else should i make sure i dont leave behind on the old site for SEO? Could it be Meta keywords? or something else?
    If they like the SEO performance they are getting, I want the new site to perform AT LEAST as well as the old one.

    Thanks
     
    jbourne84, Jun 7, 2013 IP
  2. Nigel Lew

    Nigel Lew Notable Member

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    #2
    If you want you can append your urls with .html that would resolve the issue before it actually happens. If you would rather have clean urls eg. site.com/faq for instance You can use this http://www.linkbuildr.com/301-redirection-management-plugin-for-wordpress/ which simplifies things a bit if you don't want to do this manually in htaccess.

    That being said, that site is pretty small so it would only take a few minutes to redirect the pages to the / setup. In fact you could simply rewrite .html to / with one line of code.

    hope that helps,
    Nigel
     
    Nigel Lew, Jun 7, 2013 IP
  3. r3dt@rget

    r3dt@rget Notable Member

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    #3
    Nigel covered how to direct all your old links to your new ones. As for SEO performance, Google doesn't really care if your content is on a static HTML page or a Wordpress blog. As long as you are not changing the content, title tags, meta, etc. than you should be fine. Actually, Wordpress is known for being SEO-friendly. I would advise you to install one of the many good SEO plugins as well to make it easy to change titles, URL's, and meta keywords.

    It seems from your description that you were not focused on SEO before, so now that you have a chance to re-do the site with Wordpress you should actually be increasing your rankings. Better SEO = more customers = happy boss = big bonus. Good luck!
     
    r3dt@rget, Jun 7, 2013 IP
  4. SERPpoint

    SERPpoint Active Member

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    #4
    Look of your old html site is good and it is SEO friendly too so you should keep your site with html for better result, I would say.
     
    SERPpoint, Jun 7, 2013 IP