SEO transfer to new website

[Souk]

My website currently has some strong SEO and i will be re-developing the website on a wordpress platform...which will change many of the existing URL.  Will this affect the current pages that are well indexed in Google?  Does using Wordpress or changing the URL extension (.html to .php) make a difference?

If i want to make a clean transition without effecting our existing SEO...what are some essential steps i need to take?  Example.  Current page is www.mydomain.com/name.html .... and the new URL would be www.mydomain.com/product/name.php

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks ... many paths to the same result

[KevinBudzynski]

Hi Dan. Great tip! My primitive method was to use to export a list of links in xenu, launch and do a linkchecker off a macro in excel.  Looks like your your way is better!

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks Kevin!

Also, you can crawl the old site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check old URLs. Here's how to do that.

1. Before switching to the new site, crawl the site with Screaming Frog.
2. Save your crawl
3. After switching to the new site, crawl the old URLs in list mode in Screaming Frog.
4. If they all 301 redirect then you're good. If any of them 404 then redirects are not working or not in place and you need to fix them.

Alternatively you can also grab your old URLs from Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools if you forget to crawl the old site. But I like crawling because it picks up everything.

[MonicaOConnor]

Redirecting the old URLs with 301s is the best way to carry over SEO value. You will transfer most of your link juice and help get traffic to your new pages.

As far as the PHP vs HTM, I don't believe it matters that much, I will say that your new URL structure is probably a little better than your current structure. The more information you can fit naturally into your URL is important, so having the product and the name is better than having just the name.

[KevinBudzynski]

Make sure you 301 redirect as many pages as possible (if not all) to the proper landing page (see Moz's redirect tutorial). In most cases this will pass the majority of link juice (over 90%). Once launched, do a site:domain.com and click on each page to make sure it was redirected correctly. Also, monitor your webmaster tools for any alerts.