How to Keep SEO on New Website

I have a client who built an ecommerce store many years ago. He's been paying somebody in India to SEO the site for him for the past year. He recently hired me to build a brand new site in Magento on a different host. One thing I'm worried about is that once we flip the switch and point his domain from the old site to the new site we're going to lose a ton of traffic.

Does anybody have any tips on how to make this process not hurt so much?

301 redirect. this way u not lose any traffic and seo work. May be your lose 10% backlinks value.
google 301 redirect to do it properly.

It's gonna be a painful process no matter what you do.

Make sure every single page on the site resolves properly to another page on your new site. There should be no broken links. Any link from external sites to your site should still work after the switchover. And yes, use 301 redirects - You'll probably lose more than 10% of the linkjuice (30% maybe.)

JakeD,

Pj413 has given some sound advice. When you redirect URL's on the website, you do not just want to redirect all URL's to the home page of the new site. This would pass link juice along and ensure that there are no broken links however it would make for a very poor user experience. If you don't care about user's finding similar pages to the ones they find in SERP's, just write a regular expression to 301 redirect any URL on the old domain to the home page of the new domain. If you want visitors to find similar pages, for instance having www.example.com/blue_widgets leading to www.newexample.com/blue_widgets instead of just a home page, then you will have to redirect every single directory and subdirectory on the site to a similar page on the new domain.

There may be no way to make this process less painful for yourself but you can definitely make it less painful for your visitors.

Here is some tips on using .htaccess to redirect pages of your site,

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/242/How+do+I+redirect+my+site+using+a+.htaccess+file%3F

Hope that helps,

Shawn

Thanks a ton! I'm sure I'm in for a long process...

301 is the way to go. If you're buiding a new site, ie pages from old are not going to match, this is going to hurt you... google hates broken links. I would consider doing a replica site on the new domain if possible, and working around that. This would keep a great deal of your link juice and rankings, but I realize it's not very practical. I did a similar move a few months back for a client. Another thing to consider is that the ranking will definitely disappear for a while first. I nearly had a hear attack when this happened. I think it was about 10-12 days before rankings started to come back, so something else to keep in mind on that front.

301 redirect is best option for you...