SEO and WordPress

[Historical Forums User]

Ok so I have a client that wants me to redesign his site. He is really big in SEO. His design isnt the best but he is at the top in google. I am really scared to change his site because if his ranking goes down he wont be too happy. How should I handle this? How do I know that his ranking wont go down for certain? I know of a All in One SEO plugin for wordpress, but I dont know if that will work. I am afraid any change might lower his ranking. Is this true?

Any help would be great!

[silvers]

i’m not an expert but from what i know about seo and wordpress you should be fine as long as you obey the rules.

as you know, all in one seo is ideal. copy the same meta keywords and description that he uses in his current site. make sure you slam all of that in.

make sure to use your keywords in your h1 titles for your posts and pages
make sure your alt names for your pics are seo orientated
get your keywords in the introductions

= really, the content of the site at the moment is simply being put in to a different structure, so by keeping the content the same or even more seo friendly you shouldn’t have any problems losing your rank.

if you are having a blog on it then remember to put keywords and everything in the seo section for every post and you should be laughing!

:lol:

my advice? get stuck in dude!

[jlknauff]

First of all, do all development on a demo server rather than live.

Second, as you mentioned, you should use AIO for seo, also install Google sitemap generator.

If they have a static site, their URLs will probably end in .html or .php – you can set WP up to maintain the same URL structure. That’s probably your best bet. If you want to change the URL structure, be sure to 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new URLs.

If you have any specific questions, go ahead and post them and I’ll try to help you out.

[silvers]

great advice j!

just the last paragraph was particularly interesting and i wondered if you would mind going in to a little more detail…

you can set WP up to maintain the same URL structure. – wow! would you mind expanding on that please dude?

If you want to change the URL structure, be sure to 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new URLs. – 301 redirect your old urls? that is absolutely brand new to me and very interesting, please could you tell me how you do that? (if you don’t mind)

thanks!

[Historical Forums User]

Thanks a lot for all of the input. Both posts were very informative and will be very useful in the future as I design this website. I also found the 301 redirect interesting. How is that done. I would also like to know how you set WP up to do this with the same page structure.

Thanks again!

[silvers]

syndony

one way would to have all links opening internally as you want. but when you want a link to open in a new window (like a link to another website) just add this in the code… target="_blank"

so the code would be like <a href="google.co.uk" target="_blank>google link</a>

[Author]

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