The company I work for is having its database driven web site re-developed. Part of this is a move to a new design/development company which will have the capability to do SEO for us as well, instead of having these aspects of work on the site done by different companies.

It will very likely be a few months before the re-design of the site is up and running live and in the meantime we will be continuing to keep the site as it is now, running and up-to-date. We do not want to lose the ranking we have on search engines or to fall in the number of visitors to our site.

Our problem lies in the switch between companies and versions of our web site. Do we absolutely need to continue submitting all our doorway pages to search engines in the interim? One of the things we will be adjusting with the re-development of the site is making sure it is set out in such a way that we do not need doorway pages which aren't functional normal parts of the site.

Can anyone suggest what we MUST continue doing between now and the launch of our re-developed site in order to keep our ranking for keywords and our levels of unique user sessions? We have never clearly understood what is being done by our contracted internet marketing company and if we need to keep using them for the meantime we want to be able to ask them for SPECIFIC services. Otherwise I fear we'll get a bill for "search engine optimisation" and still not know what's been done!

Many thanks,

Edie Horton