Changing the website's interface and How if effects SEO

[RetiredFolk]

Hey guys,

My site is currently run with a simple wordpress skin for newbies like myself. In about 2-3 months I am planning to change it to a "normal" website which will have a totally self made design and will be moderated like a standard website.

My Question is, will those changes affect my site's SEO? do the search engine crawlers will see my redesigned site as a new site and I will start picking up my rankings from scratch? How does changing all that will effect eveything I will have by then? keywords positions, inbound links and all that SEO jazz?

Thanks,

G

[matted]

Good question... We normally see folks moving from "plain" websites to CMS... Why are you going the other directions?

First, I'd make sure all your old pages in wordpress remain online at the same URL. If you remove the pages, they will be removed from the directories and will be a total loss. Any new pages (by url) are starting completely fresh in terms of the search engines.

Look at your logs/trackings... Is your traffic entering through your homepage or the inner pages?

Is your SE rankings due to inbound links or on-page optimization?

Obviously, your on-page information will change and probably will take some tweaking to get the results you had previously (assuming you had good SE traffic before).

Hope that helps...

[casino2k.com]

As matted said, from a SEO point of view it is very important you keep the old urls.
If you need to move a page from url1 to url2, you must use permanent redirects (htaccess is the simplest solution) to preserve old rankings.

HTACCESS EXAMPLE:

Redirect 301 /old_url.html http://www.website.tld/new_url.html

Another aspect is the CODE-TO-TEXT ratio: in my personal opinion, if you move from a page with 70% text and 30% code to a new page with the same content but with 50% code and 50% text, your page will lose some quality. Anyway it's just a personal opinion..

[waitetom]

Hello. We have recently moved our site from static HTML to a Dynamic CMS system.
We have not suffered at all with SERPS. Infact we've just moved up to PR5.
Just be sure that you use Redirect 301's. I believe someone has pointed this out above already.
Oh and changing your site's content beyond recognition all at once could negatively affect your rankings. I doubt you were planning on doing this but just in case... Don't!
Best of luck!

[RetiredFolk]

Wow... thanks guys for all this help.

I think I may have asked this question too early, since I don't know much about the cms thing and how to operate a normal site so much.

Matted - Most my traffic comes from SE into the homepage or the different langauage pages I have (.com/it/fr/es etc). The links issue isn't really much to mention but that's for another post...

Casino2k - I think I will have to remember that post for when I will actually have to deal with that, since the code thing is a little beyond my knowledge right now...

My problem will be in planting in the exisiting content, which will by then be hundreds or more pages, into a totally redesigned website. The reason for changing it is because wordpress is too strict and limited with what it offers, and also because I feel that people that land in a blog where they were just looking to play online games - gin rummy in my case - will step out immediately and go back to the next result in the SE.

I guess soon I will ask you guys for advice on how to design it although I am getting some good ideas from just looking at all those casino and poker sites.

Thanks guys, this forum is really handy and people are really helpful and patient.