URL redirect and site migration questions

I am about to undertake the process of migrating a site to wordpress. I would like to change the url structure to be more seo friendly. i am currently ranking well in the se's for many of the terms I want and I don't want to screw that up. Is this going to be a problem migrating? Is there a way to minimize damages using url redirects etc? If anyone has any tips or can point me to a guide on the subject that would be great. Thanks in advance.

 

About a year ago, I changed every URL on on PR7 site w/ over 4000 URLs, and rankings and traffic soared within 3 weeks of the new site going live. Check out my post on SEO and site redesign. It details a LOT of lessons learned and gives you a good idea of the types of things you should be considering in the planning, implementing, testing and execution of the web site redesign.

If your URLs change as a result of the web site redesign, you DEFINITELY want to redirect web pages w/ 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL whose content most closely resembles that of the old URL being redirected.

If you're going to use WordPress and haven't found a good theme yet, I would suggest checking out Thesis by DIYThemes. com. It is a premium theme that costs $87 for a single site but it entitles you to a lifetime of upgrades and access to their support forums. The developer copy is $164 which entitles you to use it on as many sites as you want as long as you own the domain, lifetime of upgrades and access to their support forums, and you can remove the footer link to their site. I bought the developer version for my blog as I will be using this for lots of sites going forward. The theme is very professional looking out of the box... no buggy CSS like other free and premium themes. A lot of changes can be made to the look and feel of the site via the custom wp-admin screens.

Regardless of the theme you pick, check out this post I just put up on my blog today about WordPress performance improvements.

Hope the info helps...

~Canonical

 

Make a permanent 301 redirect and here is the guide http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633