Wordpress site, combine Blog without hurting SEO - Need Expert Advice

[Force7]

Hi,

I come from the old html days of Frontpage and then moved to Dreamweaver. I first worked with Wordpress at version 2.7 and was not all that impressed, but then recently I worked in the new version and was extremely impressed. So my knowledge of Wordpress is VERY limited and plan to build future sites with it.

I need to know the best way to solve an issue for a customer.

The client is http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/

Site was built years ago with Frontpage. The popularity of Blogs was hot so someone told them that if they add new content it would be better to use a blog, so they added a blog.

So you have the following:

www.nextgenrestoration.com   (main site)

then they installed wordpress in a folder (blog)  www.nextgenrestoration.com/blog

Original person that built the site quit.  New person took over and said the main site needed to changed to Wordpress because they did not have Frontpage and all they knew was Wordpress.  Main site was converted to Wordpress. They wanted to keep the original design so they did not use a stock template, they just built it with their design. I guess from looking at the Editor, they manually went in and put the design in to match.

Now.. this last month, the person that had changed
the site to Wordpress quit.   So I got involved because the new person they hired  could not add content to the main website. If you add a page, it does not show up, you have to manually go in the php and add the link to the category. The new person knows how to use Wordpress but she knows nothing about PHP so is lost when it comes to manually adding content to the site.

Here was my Thoughts.

The main site needs to be rebuilt in a stock template so it automatically creates new pages, blog posts. I have to make sure that if we change the
main website that we could keep all the same links and page names. The girl
that built the site, if you hover over the links that she put it under ‘florida’,
that must be a category. But we would need to keep the same page names. I know
we could do a 301 redirect but this guy cannot lose traffic. He is already down
in hits after the last Panda update.

My thought was, rebuild the main site in a stock template so
someone can actually add content easily to the site. Also build a new blog
section so it all matches. (personally the existing design looks old and dated and needs updating)

If you look at the site now. The blog looks totally
different and it is not helping if a customer comes to the blog but cannot see
the navigation for the whole site.  My thought was to just leave the old blog, it has a LOT of backlinks. But just add a new blog to the main site and all new content goes there.  The old blog would stay just make sure we did build in some call to action so it sends them to the main site.

Also, we found we cannot create a Blog on the
wordpress we have installed in the main directory. I am guessing because it
wants to name it /blog?

I  want to be sure we give this client the best advice on what to do without
hurting his existing seo and traffic.

As you can tell, I am not qualified to really give the best advice since I am so new to Wordpress. This is a small company that really needs some help.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Force7

[zigojacko]

Sounds like a bit of a mess, if it were me, I would just do a fresh install of Wordpress, build a Wordpress theme improving their existing design, add the blog at the /blog location and have the whole website all using the same Wordpress install. Then 301 redirect any old URL's to new URL destinations.

Alternatively, just move the /blog content to a temp directory, then add /blog from the root instance of the Wordpress installation and then reimport the blog content from the MySQL database of the first instance (original /blog) of Wordpress.

[EGOL]

What a story!

This site has seen a lot of hatchet carpentry.

If I inherited this site I would hire a wordpress expert who has an established ongoing business and who also is an expert SEO.   That way I would have someone who will probably be standing in my corner long term.  I would want the person to have BOTH sets of expertise because an expert at WP and an expert at SEO allows things to fall through the cracks.

Anybody who is going to put ongoing effort into a website needs an expert with the site technology and an expert at SEO getting them set up and off to a great start (or a restart in this situation).

This type of expertise is hard to find and will likely cost a bit more but the results in the long run will be better.

[Force7]

Won't I loose page authority for the existing pages, even with a 301? There are not that many pages but really concerned about loosing some of his rankings.  He has a lot of backlinks so they will always link to the old content.

This would be like 301 redirecting the whole site?

[zigojacko]

Yes, you will, but it's going to prove far less of a headache than working with what you've got.

if you stick to the same design, import the same data, and keep the URL's the same; You won't hardly lose any page weight and authority.

Looking at the URL structure at http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/, the URL's can be kept the same with the right permalink structure.

If you're referring to the /blog content regarding everything having to be 301 redirected, then there will be a few simple processes available to make the migration smooth but seeing as this will be Wordpress to Wordpress database, you may as well export the old /blog and reimport the blog data before working on the new fresh install of Wordpress.