Converting a static site to a Wordpress site...how to transfer/convert SEO rankings?

I'm going to convert a client's static site, all hand coded HTML pages to Wordpress. They have a bunch of static pages that I'm going to keep 开发者_如何学运维as 'pages' in Wordpress. There will be some static content that I'm going to convert into blog entries (and back date them).

How do I transfer their search engine rankings to the new Wordpress site? Some will be a static page converted to a Wordpress 'page' and some will be a static page converted to a blog entry?

Use 301 redirects in your .htaccess in root. All search bots recognize 301 redirects as permanent redirects and don't drop the pages from indexes, but reassign the URL. Put them above the Wordpress rewrite block in .htaccess.

The format is:

Redirect 301 /myoldurl.html http://mydomain.com/newpagename

Notice that the domain is not included in the first URL, only the page name with suffix, assuming it's in root.

Or use WordPress › Redirection « WordPress Plugins to manage redirects inside the WP admin area and log them, too.

You can usually create a permalink structure to match the client's old URL structure.

This is better than the htaccess approach since it is easier to maintain long term. The client won't have to adapt to a new URL structure, and you won't lose any SEO value as you would with 301s ( http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/google-confirms-301-redirects-result-in-pagerank-loss.html ).

For example if the old client URL was:

http://www.example.com/blue/widgets.html

you can use the permalink structure of:

/%category%/%postname%.html

You would then create a page (or post) with the post slug of 'widgets' and categorize the page within the 'blue' category which would give you the exact same URL as they had before.

If the old site uses a variety of inconsistent URL formats, this approach is slightly less effective. But you can still do this with the most used URL format, then 301 the other URL formats.

Hope this helps!

In your destination server, you can customize the .htaccess file to redirect old pages URL to new ones. The old URL will still work and the page rank will be kept.

I would consider using Jekyll to do this. It will enable you to create exactly the same site with the same HTML structure. It will give you full control, and therefore not damage SEO. You can add CloudCannon as a CMS and make your site responsive using media queries, like this: http://www.usecue.com/2016/04/21/two-viewports-to-rule-them-all.html. Baby steps will avoid SEO disasters.