Wordpress Fan Considering Crossing Over

[shannondrawe]

I am thinking about converting my html site over to a wordpress site. None of that transition or templates or plugins are a concern to me. What I am concerned about are optimization, and organic rankings in google search. Has anyone transitioned, and what were their experiences related to optimization and search results? I have had my site since 1994, so it has left a significant footprint in the search engines due to the simple html behind it, and minimal flash slideshows. Feel free to refer me to an older thread.

[dryicerx]

The most notable change in doing so would be URL paths for your contents. If external links are usually linked to your sites by just the domain (blahblah.com), this is not a problem, but if you have articles/content written and the incoming links are pointed to specific pages/sections on your site (eg. blahblah.com/article/4435)... make sure to preserve that (you can use htaccess redirects), so the old incoming URLs will still be valid.

[shannondrawe]

Great information. Thanks, Shannon

[photoguy88]

the biggest thing is having all your title tags meta tags and links matching exactly the way they were before if you want your rankings to hold

if your site wasn't well optimized to begin with wordpress is going to help you out a ton because it is so search engine friendly in design

i always recommend downloading the 'All in One SEO pack' from the free plugins.

it will help your site's seo structure once its installed at the bottom of the pages when you are editng them you will see the all in one seo pack fields that you want to fill out evrytime you create a new page or post on your site

it's well worth the extra minute or 2 it takes to fill out that info every time you create a new page.

by the way using redirects is not the seo friendly way to preserve your rankings you want all your pages to have the same links they always did. which is time consuming but worth it if you have some good organic traffic coming in