Thread: Will changing my site to wordpress affect SEO

I want to change my dreamweaver made site to a wordpress site. I will keep the same domain name and page titles and most content. Will this adversely affect my seo and if so how can I minimize this? Most of my inbound links are from youtube videos. Thanks, Ian

Hey Big Ian, thats a great question, and welcome to our forums!

So - the main consideration when moving from handmate html to a CMS is maintaining the exact same URL structure for the new pages. How easy that will be depends on how you had them setup in the first place, for instance if you had something like:

mydomain.com/mysubect.html
mydomain.com/anothersubject.html

then its going to be dead simple - all you will need to do is create the blog, then write the pages using the same post title as your old page names, then choose custom permalinks and electing /%postname%/ as the URL structure.

IF you are using folders for certain page names you can get roung that too by using categories in wordpress and using /%category%/%postname%/ and that would do the trick.

The important thing from an SEO perspective is ensuring that you keep the URL's exactly the same from old to new, that way the links are still pointing at the right pages.

One last thing, make the move as soon as possible! Wordpress totally rocks, and trust me, you will be SO glad you did move!

Thanks, very helpful

Just to replicate Martin has said and to add that if there is a short time effect of reduced traffic do not panic, In some cases where ive done this for a client or a personal site of mine there has been a short term drop in serps as well as traffic from the big G, normally lasts about a week or two . I normally put this down to something like Google learning what you've done since your content to code ratio would have changed considerably i would imagine.

BUT the bright side is once it catches up normally you can expect to be better off than you was before, along with that you have an extremely flexible CMS at your finger tips.

These views are purely my personal ones however, you might or might not experience it.

The other important aspect is the SEO plugins that you can pick up free for Wordpress, its a great CMS for SEO, and I absolutely love it. Perhaps more so than vBulletin (what this forum is built on), and I really like vB.

Thanks for the responses. Here's what happened when I changed my domain [url]http://promovideo.co.uk[/url] from a dreamweaver built site to wordpress a few weeks ago. I did some onsite optimization in wordpress and used 'all in one seo plugin'. The keywords that I was ranking high on page 1 for before didn't change noticeably in the move and more competitive keywords that I had not ranked for previously are now appearing at the bottom of google page 2 which is promising. Somehow in the move the site has changed from a page rank 2 to page rank 3. I'm not sure how this happened or what the factors are in page rank. All in all a very good move

Google has recently made some changes to its algo (page load etc) so that may be the cause. However its good to hear you are still doing ok.

I agree with Admin, but I think even you do, every change has its effect to SEO. so be careful and write what is admin told you.

So long as every page (or at least all your most important pages) are 301'd to the new format you will be OK. I have moved blogs, sections, pages etc. so many times, and so far (touch wood) this has only improved things.

Wordpress is great for some of the reasons mentioned. So many useful plugins. Also a great way to build a community, something you cannot do with static pages.