Updating home page - will I lose positions?

[zardoz]

I have a website that has been working on SEO for a while, we have a page rank of 4 and around 10,000 links directed to our website. I created a new website that is more search engine friendly that I want to replace the home page with, while the domain name remains the same. I have good positions on some keywords on my current homepage. What I want to know, is if I switch to my new website replacing this homepage, will the meta tags remain the same (ie: will I lose my good positions that I have established on google?)

[Stefan]

Is this what your plans are? You intend to make substantial changes to the /index page of the site, on the existing domain? It shouldn't be a problem if: your title is much the same, the kw make up and density is much the same, what the SE's liked about the page is much the same, and your incoming links are the same. G likes freshness, so if it's done right, you might benefit from it.

[zardoz]

so if i will keep the existing meta tags on the homepage, but i will change all the names of the pages i will be in the same positions?

[idolw]

if you do not change the URLs but only design/layout, why shall it have any influence?

[Stefan]

if you do not change the URLs but only design/layout, why shall it have any influence?

On-page factors (keywords and density, amount of text, etc) are very important in where the page is placing now. If these are changed for the worse, it could drop in the results.

Zardoz, the meta tags count for very little and are mostly ignored by the search engines. The <title></title> is the most important part of the header. Be very circumspect about how it is changed. Other than that, your keywords in the text itself are the big thing. Don't turn them into spam by loading the page with them, but make sure you have a good occurence (with variations like plurals) that appear in a natural fashion on the page. Feel free to make the page nice and "fat" with lots of content - the SE's love text, that's their main diet.

[annej]

Make sure you have about the same key word density, the same keywords in your title, in H1 tags, in anchor tags, bold, italics, etc. Then you should be OK. I'm not even sure all of those matters but you might as well keep them the same.

I play around with my homepage a lot and it never seems to make a difference. I think it's because off page factors are a bigger part of the algo.