Changing design for a client. SEO concerns.

[Eblan]

Hi there!

A client requested me to change the look of his website entirely. It currently ranks #16 on Google with one of their main keywords.

My problem is:

The current site was made in a CMS I'm not familiar with and all of its pages urls are not SEO friendly (EX: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=95).

It is the first time I have come up with this situation so I would appreciate any tips or links to useful information. I tried searching in SEOmoz and came up with nothing. I'm sure this is a common problem though.

Since they want a static website, for starters their page extensions will change from .php to .html I'm not 100% sure but I think this will be a problem for their current ranking in Google.

Any ideas?

Edit: I forgot to mention that all of the backlinks this site has points to their hompage as www.mysite.com, I guess this is good.

[Eblan]

Thanks a lot for your response Dave. I'm now confident thanks to the responses on what should I do to solve my issue.

[DaveMri]

Eblan, 301 redirects are the way to go.

Be aware that when doing 301 redirects you might temporarily lose rankings (if the internal pages rank), but in your case I would expect not only a quick recovery, but a rankings improvement due to a better URL format.

[Eblan]

I know it doesn't sound very good but they only have 10 backlinks, and I doubt they are paid.

It seems the previous designer used a template, I am not familiar with the CMS they are using. It's not Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress (I forgot the name but has a sun in the logo).

I will follow your advice on the 301 redirects for sure and erasing the extensions using .htaccess.

Thanks a lot for your response!

[irvingw]

What is the type of CMS? Sometimes small sites that are manageable and not constantly updated are easier just to handle as html pages. Drupal for instance is a nightmare for a layman to work on and overkill for a small site.

You should be able to make SEO friendly URLs in the CMS without changing the CMS though. I would look into that first.

Don't add the html extension you don't need it. All the old URLs should 301 to the new URLs. Also the CMS might be able to handle that or you can do it in .htaccess. It should cause no drop in rankings.

It's actually not really good that all of the pages are linking to the homepage, but it's OK as long as they aren't paid links. You should look at the backlink profile.