I’m nearly finished on a new version of an existing website. The old version is in Blocks RW4 and new is Stacks RW6. Will I loose any SEO by the obliteration of the old Stacks site? I intend to use the same page and folder names etc. Eventually I’ll be replacing the old Blog with Armadillo, but thought I could keep the old Blog as an archive and keep the SEO work that I put into it. I can PM the URL if anyone’s interested in having a look, the SEO isn’t too bad and still gets a good 300 average visits a month even after a bit of neglect. So I’m worried about loosing this traffic, easier to build on this than start afresh.
I don’t see any reason to worry about SEO for upgrading. As long as the URLs remain the same and of a similar topic, you should be okay. It may even improve as, I assume, your new site is mobile responsive.
For the replacement of the blog, I would not recommend keeping the old one around. I’d migrate it into armadillo and redirect the old URLs into the new ones. This is my personal preference.
The SEO question will be a reason for upgrading from the old RW 4 to a new RW 6 project. and not a reason against upgrading the site
SEO is not only determined by meta tags in the source code but by a modern look and feel, a good usability and a good structure. I doubt that a site that was build with RW 4 will meet the requirements of today’s SEO.
And the old URLs should be no problem when you create redirects to the new URLs. If you publish the URL of your website we could have a look into the site and perhaps make some suggestions for the update.
And do not focus only on visitors, look for bounce rate, exit rate and the conversion. 300 visitors a month is not so much that there will be a big risk that these visitors will get lost by upgrading a site. It can only get better by updating
Completely agree with comments thus far. Aside from redirecting any URL’s you may decide not to use, an upgrade - particularly to a mobile friendly site, will be a good thing. A few general SEO things to remember if you are unsure:
Do 301 permanent redirects for any redundant URL’s to a relevant new one. You can do these in cPanel or whatever you have for hosting
Do register both www and non www versions with Google / Bing and indicate your preference. May be worth finding which version has best ranking currently and stick with that. You should also set up a redirect from one to the other using htaccess (don’t use in latest version of cPanel - doesn’t work)
Make sure you have a description meta tag for each page
Make sure you have alt tags for all images
Make sure your content is well written, relevant to each page, and neatly structured using header tags
If you can get any inbound links from other quality sites, do so
Do add some social media if possible
There is plenty more you can do if needed but these are pretty much the basics. Obviously you may know all this already but if you need any help please shout.