I’m about to be redevelop a website that has good rankings in the search engines. The problem is that their website is very old and its all static HTML pages built in nested tables.
I did a quick search before making this post and saw some similar threads about how preserving the URLs and menu structure is important for the search engines.
Unfortunately, part of what I’m doing is integrating wordpress as a CMS so the URLs aren’t going to be able to stay the same.
What is the best strategy for when I go to redo the site? Should I keep the old site up and redirect to the wordpress site?
I write good HTML and css which I know helps a lot. I’m also planning on using the wordpress plugin All in One SEO pack.
Make sure you 301 redirect all of your old URLs to the corresponding new URL. That will give you your best chance of maintaining your rankings.
Also, try and keep as much of the old on page information the same including your page titles. If you need to re-optimize some of your page titles that is fine, but it could affect your rankings some.
In order to retain your ranking its advisable to do 301 redirects for only pages which are often index by search engine, which has many backlinks and particularly which has good traffic, other than these its better to change the page with new url. Its due to search engine find difficulty in crawling when there are so many redirects in the site.