As Jim said in the podcast he did with Diverse Solutions, there is no better time to switch to WordPress than now IF you are going to do it. There are of course no guarantees when it comes to SEO (anyone that says otherwise is lying), but from our experience with our clients, we usually see a boost in SEO rankings after migrating a static site to WordPress.

So, you’ve decided to switch and want to make sure you don’t lose your SEO juice? This question came from my friend Conrad Saams from Avvo:

If I’m transitioning a static site to WordPress for CMS functionality and to add blogging functionality to my site, what are the top things to consider to ensure I don’t lose existing SEO value? Are there any ways to automate this conversion?

There are two components to handle during a website migration from an SEO standpoint.

Content and links.

Content: Content migration obviously depends on what platform you are coming from and how much existing content you have. If you only have a few pages on your static site, you’re probably best served to just manually copy and paste that content over to new pages on your WordPress site. If you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands — well then you should probably hire someone to do a mass data import. Who to hire or what tool to use all depends on what sort of static website you have currently and what it uses as it’s central content management system.

Links: There are two types of links; internal and external.

Internal links are links from within specific pages to other specific pages on your site. For instance, you may have a landing page for “Tuscon short sales” that you link from the text on your main “Tuscon” community page. Or, in the text of your “about” page, you link to your primary “contact page”. You get the picture. You have two options here. The first is to change all your internal links to point to the correct pages on your new site. The second is to actually put 301 redirects into place that will redirect your old pages to their new locations and leave all the links you have within the content you import to WordPress the exact same.

External links are the most powerful factor in the overall SEO of your site, so it’s important to maintain their value by ensuring they don’t point at non existent pages. With that said, most external links to any website are to the home page. And luckily, if you are not changing domain names (ie you are replacing your static site with a WordPress site on the same domain), whatever home page links you had previously are going to transfer over and you won’t lose any SEO juice. Now, deep links are another story. A deep link is a link to a specific page deep within your site (basically a link to anywhere other than the home page) – such as example.com/short-sales-in-tuscon.html. 301 Redirects need to be used to redirect any old pages that have external links pointing to them to the new page – such as example.com/tuscon-short-sales/. You’ll lose the value of an external deep link if it’s pointing at a page URL that doesn’t exist on your new site (resulting in a 404 page at the other end of the link).

Regarding 301 redirects, you can use the Redirection plugin to handle that for a small number of pages. However, if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of pages to redirect, you’ll probably want to pay someone to do a database script and map them to your new pages in an automated fashion.

Hope that helps. If not, leave a comment explaining where I lost you 🙂