Moving Existing Website to CMS

[mjhorbal]

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.

[FishAcct]

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

[MarkFasel51]

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!

[Dekoda_Jones]

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.

[stevecounsell]

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