Moving Existing Website to CMS
-
I had zero experience with design, seo, etc..prior to joining seomoz last year, but have been tweaking my site to get better ranking and leads.
I'm at the point now where I have to move my existing 8 year old static html website (lifeinsuranceadvisors.com) to a CMS system but am concerned about the impact this will have on my rankings, and money I currently make from my site selling the leads i generate.
I generate leads for life insurance industry, have 150+/- existing pages, and it takes me forever to add new pages, make changes, not to mention the look is worn.
What is the best way to make this move?
Secondly, what SEO friendly CMS systems do you recommend?
Thanks
Mike Horbal
Thank you all for the quick response and great info...I'm going to put my wishlist together before i make a move..thanks again.
-
Hi Michael,
Take a look at StudioPress.com (Wordpress Theses) - They have some excellent tutorials and help and have created the Genesis Framework and a whole load of professional designs that are easy to configure to your needs.
They have also created a set of free plug ins that make altering the detail of the designs easy. Like "Simple Edits" which allows you to change the footer section / copyright notice.
I've been using these for about a year and find them super easy to use.
Hope that helps
Steve
-
We recommend customers toward open source CMS's like Wordpress or Druple. This means that any designer/developer can work on the site for you, it's supported by a community of developers all working towards bettering the system and you can easily update content and images yourself.
It is worth sitting down and talking about your goals and desires before selecting a CMS as some are stronger in certain areas, so you want to be sure that the one you choose is scalable for your needs.
One thing I would certainly spend money on is keeping your imagery and stylising of the site updated and 'fresh'. by doing this, you are keeping up with the competition and making sure you fortify against competitors.
-
I agree with Funkitude. As a web designer / developer and internet marketing professional, the process of taking all your old website content and ensuring that it you have a clean migration is a key aspect to any website launch.
WordPress is a great CMS as mentioned and features many community plugins. For SEO in particular, I recommend http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ which provides many great features for enabling your website for easy SEO.
If you need any assistance, please feel free to reach out and I can will try to help in any way that I can!
-
Here are the steps I would take:
- Wordpress is a great CMS for those who are new to CMSs. It's free, it's easy, there's great a great support community.
- Find out which pages on your site are getting traffic (check your analytics)
- Determine which pages on your site have inbound links (SEOmoz has a great module for this)
- Copy the content on these pages to your new site (inside wordpress, or whatever CMS you end up using)
- 301 redirect the old URLs to their new home inside Wordpress
- Create a sitemap for your new site
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the best way to handle annual events on a website?
Every year our company has a user conference with between 300 - 400 attendees. I've just begun giving the event more of a presence on our website. I'm wondering, what is the best way to handle highlights from previous years? Would it be to create an archive (e.g. www.companyname.com/eventname/2015) while constantly updating the main landing page to promote the current event? We also use an event website (cvent) to handle our registrations. So once we have an agenda for the current years event I do a temporary redirect from the main landing page to the registration website. I don't really like this practice and I feel like it might be better to keep all of the info on the main domain. Wondering if anybody has any opinions or feedback on that process as well. Just looking for best practices or what others have done and have had success with.
Web Design | | Brando161 -
How to check if the website has duplicate content?
I've been working with the websites from couple of months and it was always in my mind if there could be a legit way to find if the website have a duplicate content. I've tried couple of websites through google but nothing worked for me. It would be much appreciated if anyone can help. Thanks
Web Design | | rajveer_singh0 -
Best CMS for e-commerce
Our website is powered through Magento CMS although I am losing my patience with it. We are completely restricted as to what we can do. The development costs are high and ongoing. We are a fast moving company but we feel that Magento is not the right solution for the companies future. We can not style pages to drive conversions without putting styling requests to our developers which takes months to complete and the end results are not always as we would prefer, we would prefer to style the pages ourselves using blocks etc. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Web Design | | Jseddon920 -
Domain Authority Drop After Website Relaunch
Prior to my website redesign and relaunch on July 10th, our domain authority was 33. 301 redirects were implemented properly. Out or 600 pages, about 200 URLs were modified. Domain authority has dropped to 28. Rankings are terrible. Conversions are awful. What does the domain authority drop mean? I have noticed in the past that a drop in domain authority tends to coincide with more a drop in ranking and a drop in the quality of visitors. The site is www.metro-manhattan.com Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is it common to have some of error/warning(currency duplicate,redirect, etc...) in most website that rank well?
Hi could any body could give me some idea on 'on page optimisation' Currently in my campaign I have around 3000+ errors, 14,000+ warning, 7000+ notices for the following reasons: Overly-Dynamic URL
Web Design | | LauraHT
Temporary Redirect
Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)
Duplicate Page Title
etc... First of all I know these have negative effect on SEO. Now to fix towards those issues it involve lots of works and times. At the same time most of our important keywords/url rank position have not changed over the last 12 months. Does that mean the above has only limited negative effect? I just want to know is it worthy to invest the man/hour/money to clean those issues. As it involves decent development time. Is it common to have some of error/warning in most website that rank well? (e.g. I 've seem may big website have duplicate title/meta-desc on their currency variant page)0 -
How does using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress/Drupal) affect backlinks and SEO?
So I need to build a website with over 100 pages in it. Elements of the design will probably be moved around and or tested so I need to use a CMS. It's pretty much a review site so while the content will remain static I'd like to employ A/B testing to mess with conversion rates. Wordpress has a plugin for that even. So I'm just wondering, since CMS pages are pretty much created on spot and not retrieved from a library, how this affects backlinks and anchor text? How exactly does the external website point to yours if the URL is dynamically generated? Or am I misunderstanding something? Please recommend any extra resources as well if you can.
Web Design | | seochump0 -
Rel Canonical tag usage on ECommerce website
Hello, I have read up on the rel canonical tag and I'm ready to apply it to my site's categorization structure. However, I'm concerned that, because my website does not have a "view all" button for our product pages, the rel canonical tag would not be appropriate. For example, if you come to my site's main category url, you come to mysite.com/main-category At this level - you get the top 12 items in the category. if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to mysite.com/main-category12-24 etc. etc. The site does not offer a view all function. Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly? Thanks.
Web Design | | Blenny0 -
SEO list for creating the *perfect* website
If you could build your website from scratch and have your developers do anything you want (within reason), what list of SEO requirements would you send them? Does anyone know of any good articles on the perfect SEO wish list? Happy Holidays!
Web Design | | MirandaP1