If your web site has old URLs that are not supported by your current site anymore, adding a 301 redirect to these pages will prevent it from losing traffic, and possibly even more important benefit its ranking in search results as it will continue to pass page rank from these links to the new pages. Here are some potential situations involving old URLs which you might want to use a 301 redirect for:

• An old page has been removed and combined with another page, or placed in a new location. – 301 Redirect
• Your product search feature was moved to a different directory or its URLs changed. – 301 Redirect
• A page has been converted to a different file format type. – 301 Redirect

301 redirects are also important because bookmarks and links to these old URLs may still exist in people’s web browsers and most importantly on other web sites (keeping your link juice!). If you fail to use the 301 redirect people who have links on there site or have you bookmarked will receive “The page cannot be displayed” error.

To install a 301 redirect, you can either use the “Redirect” page under the cpanel or edit the text-based “.htaccess” file. You might have to create this file if it doesn’t already exist under the relevant directory or subdomain; if you use cPanel, it will handle this for you. Here are some examples of valid 301 redirection commands which could be listed in a .htaccess file:

1. Redirect 301 /contact.htm http://www.example.org/contact-us.shtml
2. Redirect 301 /weather.php http://weather.example.net/index.php
3. Redirect 301 /stats.txt http://www.example.com/data/statistics.html

As you can see from these examples, the commands simply specify the redirection type and indicate both URLs involved. The filename of the old page comes first, and isn’t a full URL (because the .htaccess file is located in the directory or subdomain it was in), while the new URL is complete. You can, optionally, indicate a subdirectory as part of the original filename (example: /about/index.htm). Be sure to test all redirects after setting them up.

In addition to redirecting old URLs which are no longer supported, 301 redirects may be used to provide short web addresses that people can more easily write down or remember. For example, to promote a page with a long URL in a newspaper, magazine, radio advertisement, or bulk mailing, a short redirection URL could be created to forward users to an existing page. If only one of these URLs is used for each promotional method, it will have the added benefit of separately tracking how many “hits” are received.

Basically, the 301 redirect offers a versatile and convenient way to send users to a specific location when they attempt to access old, non-supported URLs. It prevents web sites from losing the traffic and search engine benefits of existing but outdated inbound links. It may be used to create brief, easy-to-remember redirection URLs as well.

When thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), people often overlook the importance of file names. Read on to learn about how you can implement SEO friendly file names on your web site…

When a web page’s file name is oriented to SEO, it will have a better chance of gaining high rankings in search results – especially if other efforts are made to optimize it. To be SEO friendly, a file name should do each of the following:

1. Contain keywords that people search for (the words must also be relevant to the page’s content)

2. Separate the keywords, preferably with hyphens (-); see the example below.

3. Avoid repeating words in the rest of the URL, like domain or directory names.

This is not really all that difficult to implement. Here are some examples of SEO friendly web page file names:

pascal-programming-books.htm

used-motorcycles-los-angeles.htm

get-better-tv-reception.shtml

charlotte-nc-weather-report.asp

easy-microwave-recipes.php

Hyphens separate the words so that search engines can individually recognize them, rather than seeing them as one long, unintelligible word. Some sites use other punctuation, but hyphens are the most SEO friendly.

If your web site already has dozens or hundreds of pages, it is probably best to start using these file names on new pages, but to leave the existing pages as they are.

On the other hand, if your site only has a few pages, it might be worthwhile to change their file names. However, the old pages ought to be removed and your site should be set to redirect users from the old URLs to the new. Search engines don’t look favorably on duplicate pages, and you also don’t want users who have “bookmarked” the pages not to be able to return.

Putting in a little extra time to make your file names SEO friendly should eventually help increase your search engine based traffic without much difficulty.

Web sites often need to redirect users to a different page, either because a page no longer exists, an invalid URL was entered, or the filename of a page has been changed. Two common types of redirection are 404 and 301; read on to learn more about them and what kind of situation each redirect is better for.

404 redirects send the user to a single “catch-all” page which tells them that the webpage they are looking for does not exist. It can then link to the home page, allow visitors to search the web site, or provide a list of links for each section. It is not specific to the URL the user entered, and will show the same information regardless of whether the URL was incorrect or outdated. According to wikipedia.org, a 404 redirect page should be at least 513 bytes for compatibility with some versions of MSIE. Example:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

On the other hand, a 301 redirect forwards visitors going to a specific (former) webpage to a new page. If the user is sending form data to a PHP file, such as a search query, this data will be redirected to the new page as well. This can give users a more specific replacement for the invalid address they are trying to reach, increasing the chance that they will stay on the web site. Example, for a site where the search feature has been moved to a new subdomain:

Redirect 301 /find.php http://search.example.com/results.php

So which type of redirect is better for web sites to use? This depends upon the situation. If a webpage has been moved or combined with other pages, a 301 redirect is probably best. However, if pages have been deleted and there is no similar content on the web site, or users are just typing in the wrong URLs, a 404 redirect is better. Many sites can effectively make use of both 301 and 404 redirects.

When a page’s location is changed, both types of redirect are better than leaving duplicate pages in place. Search engines do not react favorably to multiple pages with identical content, and the web site operator receives the added burden of having to update both pages every time a change needs to be made.

Webpage redirection can be set up through cPanel (or a similar interface), or by adding/editing .htaccess files (via FTP or File Manager). Other types of automatic redirects exist as well, such as 302 and 307 (like 301, but “temporary”) and META refresh – which usually isn’t recommended, but is better than nothing if a hosting provider doesn’t allow other types.

Many web site owners fail to realize that the URL of an individual page can affect how much search engine traffic it receives. Like titles and keywords, URL structure is an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Read on to learn more about the best practices for creating an SEO based URL structure…

Putting related search keywords in the URL will help improve a page’s ranking. However, it is best to separate these words so that search engine “spiders” (a.k.a. “robots”) can distinguish between them; otherwise, it just looks like one long word. Some people use underscore (_) symbols in between the keywords, but using a hyphen (-) is generally considered preferable for SEO. If the page has content people are likely to revisit regularly – such as updated news or weather – consider creating a page with a short, easy to remember URL (perhaps a subdomain) which redirects to the long URL. Make sure the longer address is linked to from the “Site Map”.

Using a long URL structure generally isn’t a problem with regard to SEO; search engines will still index very long (over 100 letters) URLs, and most web browsers can handle addresses which are thousands of characters long. Nonetheless, excessively long URLs are less appealing for people to use in print or email. There is no need to repeat words already used in the URL; don’t use a word in the filename that repeats the domain, directory, or subdomain name. The same applies to the page’s title and “keywords” META tag, but not the body/text of the page, where SEO keywords should be used several times.

As an example of applying these best practices to the structure of a specific URL, the file name for a page selling portable computers might be cheap-laptop-notebook-computer. The entire address would be something like www.example.com/shopping/cheap-laptop-notebook-computer.htm. Changing the directory name “shopping” to “buy” would best target keywords people are likely to search for. On some search engines, text files (.TXT format) are listed with the URLs as their titles; others use the first line of text for this purpose. The same goes for documents in PDF format.

Basically, the best practices for creating an SEO oriented URL structure include using keywords (or phrases) people search for, separating each word with a hyphen, and avoiding repetitive URLs. Applying these practices isn’t difficult, and has the potential to substantially increase traffic.

If you are conducting SEO (search engine optimization) work on a website, internal factors are aspects that you have complete control over. SEO factors of this type include…

Keywords: Both keyword density in the text and words listed in the META keyword tags are internal factors which help determine which search queries will cause pages to appear in results. They should be words people actually search for frequently.

Redundancy: If different pages on a website are too similar to each other, they might receive a poorer ranking in search results. This also sometimes applies to duplicate content it shares with other websites, such as press releases which have appeared elsewhere.

Navigation: Search engine “robots” or “spiders” should be able to navigate the website and index each page. Animated javascript menus may look nice, but are often impossible for “spiders” to access. A text based Site Map is useful for providing easy navigation to all internal pages.

Updates: Adding new information or updating existing data on a webpage is another internal factor which has the potential to boost its rankings. It also makes the page more likely to be added to directories and/or linked to by other websites, providing additional SEO benefits.

Description: The description META tag determines (with some exceptions) what appears below the title in search results, as well as some website directories. This is not as essential as some of the other internal SEO factors, but should at least be added to the major pages of a site.

Titles: To be suited for SEO purposes, the webpage titles should be appealing for searchers to click on, and clearly differentiate each page. Among other factors you should consider the title’s length; part may be cut off in search results if it is too long.

Links: It can be detrimental for SEO efforts to add internal links to websites which have been removed/downgraded in search results for using objectionable promotion techniques (like “doorway pages”), or to openly sell links to other sites (unless the “nofollow” tag/attribute is used).

URLs: Combined with other internal factors, putting relevant keywords in the webpage file names and/or domain name can be helpful in SEO work. Search engines cannot recognize unseparated words; dashes are generally recommended more than underscores for separating multiple words in a URL.

Correctly and thoroughly optimizing internal SEO factors will potentially help improve the external factors affecting a website as well, such as the number of inbound links.

The SEO benefits of shorter URLs are disputed, with some claiming that a shorter URL is better and others saying that a long URL of the right type is better for SEO. Shorter URLs also provide some advantages regarding non-SEO issues, which should be taken into consideration as well.

According to marketingsherpa.com, people are more likely to click on shorter URLs in search results. To some extent this behavior makes sense; perhaps you’re looking for information on the city of Berlin, New Hampshire. If you see a URL like “www.example.com/berlin-nh/”, it is more likely the web site in question created a detailed page with specific information on the city, whereas URLs like “www.example.com/north-america/usa/city.php?st=nh&ct=berlin” or “www.example.com/berlin-nh-usa-northern-new-hampshire.htm” suggest that they might be automatically generated pages with more general information and mostly links. So even if a longer URL gets ranked better in search results, some searchers will consider shorter URLs more unique and authoritative on their subjects.

However, some people involved in SEO feel that it is better to have long URLs with many keywords related to the pages in them (usually separated by hyphens) so as to enhance search result rankings. However, it remains to be seen as to whether or not search engines will eventually remove this from their criteria.

A shorter URL also makes it easier for people to remember, works better in e-mail messages, and is more likely to be printed on paper, posted in message boards/forums, or referred to in the media. Linking to a lot of long URLs within your web site will also use more storage space and bandwidth, as well as making the site load less quickly. While a long SEO based URL might be something like “www.example.com/weather/hurricane-noel-october-2007.html” or “weather.example.com/hurricane-noel-flooding-mexico.htm”, some options for shorter URLs include using the date the page was created (like “www.example.com/102907/”) or just adding a number to the end of the page’s category (such as “www.example.com/weather73.htm”).

There is also the issue of longer or shorter domain names and their SEO effect; some marketers and others have registered very long domain names so that they could put related keywords in the domain name itself (for example, new-fast-color-laser-printers.com). The SEO value of doing this is disputed, and is unlikely to make up for reduced credibility and memorability caused by an unusually long domain name, especially for web sites designed to gain revenue from sales (rather than advertising).

Basically, longer URLs are better for efforts specifically aimed at SEO, while shorter URLs can indirectly provide better search engine optimization and/or more traffic.

Search Engine Optimization depends on a variety of things. One of those is optimizing the web site’s URL. Generally speaking, URLs with keywords integrated in them will produce the best results as these URLs help actual searchers as well as the search engines know what the site is about. There are a couple of best practices to keep in mind when optimizing your site’s URL.

First, there is the domain name itself. Try to keep this fairly short and avoid names that contain too many hyphens or misspellings, as they tend to look like spam. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t use misspelled words at all. Web 2.0 names are hugely popular right now, think of Flickr – as long as you aren’t overdoing it you should be fine.

Also consider the directory structure. Search engines are better at searching, and understanding, sites that use static URLs rather than dynamic ones. For example, http://myblog.com/optimizing-your-url is easier to read than http://myblog.com/?id=09 for both search engines and live visitors. Also, try to use hyphens instead of underscores because Google doesn’t see underscores as separators.

While it is true that search engines have improved their ability to crawl and index web sites with dynamic URL structures, and they will most likely continue to do so, you will still improve your SEO rankings by optimizing your URL using the above tips.