June 2009
Content Managed Systems are clearly the future but they can affect your search traffic. Our project was to move to a content managed website and do so without upsetting our rankings - something we have done for clients many times before.
We have gone for a system called Joomla which we know that many clients have been very happy with and some of our largest ones too. The system runs on php and uses a mysql database - which basically means that most competent programmers could get under its hood and understand how it works. We wanted to duplicate our site visually and get all the content into the database so that we could reskin it sometime in the future. This was easily completed and the site was up and running quite quickly.
The main issues were:
- Page Names - these should be natural language page names and if they are different to the original site then a 301 redirect should be put in place
- Ensure that the functionality you have in place (such as email collection forms, live chat) are all in place within the CMS
- Meta Tags - make sure that these are all properly completed for the new site
- Use a test server thoroughly before you go live and have as few false starts as possible
- Upload a new sitemap for Google and all the other engines to spider
- Do not forget your stats code and other extra tags (such as search engine verification tags) must also be uploaded
Otherwise the whole process was much easier than anticipated.....and we have lost no rankings so thats pretty good!