Hi,

If you want to put the sites on Wordpress, then by all means, do so.

In regards to page rank and rankings in general. Try to keep as many of the pagenames and links the same as possible. For everything that doesn't make it with the exact same name and directory structure, use the Wordpress plugin "Simple 301 Redirects".

Take care of SEO while changing sites.
Same content on two domains will affect SEO of 2nd site. Google will see ur 2nd site as duplicate of 1st site. It would be better if U copy all stuffs from 1st sites and then install WP on them.

Thnx...Any more question..ask me...I like to answer WP related questions.

I agree that you should move all of your site files to a backup directory (i.e. OLDSITE) then copy/paste your content into a new WordPress installation.

You don't have to do move your old site's files with FTP, but FTP is easier and faster in my opinion.

When possible, use the exact same name for the new version of the page. Since your old site is static HTML, I'm guessing this won't really be an option because all pages will end in .html or .htm. This is why you'll need to use the 301 redirect plugin mentioned earlier.

Once you've moved your old site files to the oldsite directory, this will be what you need to do for each page:

1) Copy content of www.yoursite.com/oldsite/your_article.html
2) Paste the content into a new WordPress post or page and publish that post using the slug (custom URL) title your-article
3) Use the 301 redirect plugin to point all requests for www.yoursite.com/your_article.html to www.yoursite.com/your-article
4) Repeat for all pages on your site

While there's always a risk you'll lose SEO when you do this kind of thing, I think Google understands that people need to modify their site's structure from time to time. As long as old links point to pages that contain the same content, I can't imagine your SEO will take a big hit.

Good luck, let me know if you have any other questions.

Hostgator does offer a of backup service, but it's more for restoring lost site data than doing the kind of thing you're trying to do. The backup people are referring to on this thread is something you'll do manually. It won't be a single file--it will be a new folder you create on your hosting space that will contain all of your old site's files. You can do this via File Manager or FTP. Once you've created the backup folder (e.g. oldsite) and moved your old site's files into it, you can view the old site by going to www.yoursite.com/oldsite.

Once you've manually transferred the old site files to your backup folder, you can install WordPress in your root/home directory. It's fine for your backup folder and your WP installation to live in the same directory--they won't have any affect on one another.

Once you've got your old site moved into the backup folder and your new WordPress site installed, it's just a matter of copy/pasting content into WordPress.

I would highly recommend keeping the hyphenated version of your site instead of switching to a different domain. I know the non-hyphenated name might seem more professional, but if you've had content on your old domain for any length of time you don't want to give up all that SEO juice (older domains get more points from Google).