Optimizing A Complex Site

[Dami]

Our company is an import/export trading company with a large variety of products, most in the lumber industry, but also extending into the agriculture and food industries. We have recently consolidated from a "small group of warring confederations" using various company names to one company with one name. That's all well and good for the marketing department; one brand, one name.

Unfortunately, that doesn't always translate well to the web and search engine optimization. Currently, each "department" has its own domain name (or multiple domain names pointing to the same URL) and is optimized as its own entity, IOW, our website is department-oriented. All domains have a similar look and feel, but each is its own entry point to our website. Now marketing wants us to go product-oriented, but all under the main company domain, dropping all the departmental domains.

My question is how the heck do I optimize for this? I'm a rank novice when it comes to SEO (can you tell? ;)) and could use some advice from the more experienced on how to construct the new site with SEO in mind. Any insights are appreciated.

TIA

[Dami]

Have I asked something wrong? In the wrong forum?

[Gurtie]

well I guess the first question is whether it's right to combine all the sites into one?, and if so how quickly it can be done in a sensible way?

How do the existing sites rank for their keywords and how competitive are the keywords? what will you loose by redesigning them? I entirely understand from a marketing POV why you would want a rebrand, and possibly also to pull them all into the one site but there are different ways to go about it and it might be worth you all discussing that before marketing impliment any grand schemes :)

Once you know what you stand to loose you can start to work out what you should do. Part of that will depend on how the existing sites are structured and how easy it would be to rebrand them (if they already rank well and are database driven and stylesheet controlled then I suggest you tell marketing to rebrand them initially and then spend some time working on a longer term strategy).

Sorry I know that probably just raised more questions in your mind but imho this is one of those things which is so dependent on your exact circumstances that it's really difficult for anyone to give you advice.

[Dami]

Thank you, Gurtie. I appreciate your time.

We are planning a complete site overhaul (probably some time next year), so I think I'll have time to do some research. I'm a bit overwhelmed at the number of products we handle and trying to get my arms around each department's needs. As I'm the sole web person, everything "web" is in my milieu. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more cost effective to hire a specialist to do it right.

Again, thanks.