Optimizing an old site

Hi Warriors,

I just signed a new deal with a guy who runs a metal design and manufacturing company.

They've got an old corporate site that he wants optimized (on-site SEO) and then he wants a new site built just for a brand new product they're launching.

I offered to build him a brand new site for both the new product and company site because his corporate site is a few years old and it was build with a free website builder software from the webhost 1and1.com

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The problem
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The site is msdf1.com

He designed the site himself and said that they get a lot of compliments about it, so he doesn't want to change it, just wants me to do whatever I need to do to get better rankings.

My idea is to make sure each page is centered around a KW, with that KW in the title, the h1 tag and throughout the page, as well as naming that page /keyword.html. Currently his pages are /1.html, /2.html, /3.html etc


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The kicker
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Despite having almost no backlinks, the site has a PR of 1 and is actually doing pretty well in the rankings for several of his products/keywords.

There are only 6 companies in the US that provide his government certified steel products and he's usually around the first page.

I want to improve his site's structure (on page) because it needs to be done, and he's paying me for it. Then I'm going to be building links and getting him ranked higher with off page SEO.

I would like to come back and show that I made X changes on each page and once I start the off page stuff, he will see an improvement.

I think renaming his pages will help in the long run, but I don't want him to drop off the map up front or he probably won't have much confidence after that.

Do you recommend renaming all of the pages and putting in 301 redirects to pass on the PR and link juice from the old pages to new ones? (example /11.html --> /steel-design.html)



Thank you so much for your help and recommendations

Jordan Godbey