Easy Way to Implement a 301 Redirect

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301 redirectThe aim of this post is to explain 301 redirects in their simplest form so that anyone with a website who has heard of a redirect is able to understand and implement a 301 redirect on a site.

What is a 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. This type of redirect is used to preserve the link equity which was built up from the original URL so that it can be passed on to the new URL. This should help to keep the original search engine ranking of the URL too.

When a 301 redirect is implemented on a URL, the main aim is to help the site visitor to find the newest and most relevant information.

When should you use a 301 Redirect?

  • If you have built a new website and it is using a new URL, then you want to help people to find the new website by redirecting them to the new site via the old URL.
  • If your site is accessed via lots of different URL’s, e.g. – people use www.yoursite.com/home, yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com – it’s a good idea to point them all to one centralised (preferred) page
  • If you have 2 websites and you want to merge them together it is advised that you redirect the old URL’s to the correct pages

.htaccess 301 Redirect

The easiest and quickest way to 301 redirect a page is via the .htaccess file.

1 – To start off with you want to check your server to see if a .htaccess already exists, if so, download it to your computer so that you can edit it. It’s a good idea to make a copy of this file so that if anything were to go wrong, you can delete the file you created and upload the original .htaccess file

2 – If there is no .htaccess file present on the server you can easily create your own. Open Notepad and save the file as .htaccess

3 – Add the following code to the file (replace with your own URL’s)

Redirect 301 /old http://www.yoursite.com/new

4 – If you downloaded the .htaccess file from the server and it already had some code, simply skip a line and then add the code in point 3.

5 – Save the file- remember to keep the file names as .htaccess

6 – Upload the .htaccess file to the root folder of your server. If there was a .htaccess file present before then you’ll probably be prompted to overwrite the existing file, which is fine.

7 – Test to make sure your redirect was successful by typing in the original URL and you should arrive at the new URL.

How To Conduct Keyword Research

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When you first start off working on the SEO of a website, one of the first things you’ll need to do is keyword research. This is a very methodical process but can be trickier on larger and more complex sites.

If you are doing the SEO for a client or friend they may already have an idea as to what keywords they would like to be ranking for and that’s absolutely fine. But the more you dive in to the research it may become clear that their ideas may not be the right direction for the campaign. With this initial work conducted for them, you can show them what keywords they should be aiming for and back it up with figures.

You need to remember; you’re not looking to pull in huge numbers of visitors, you need to be pulling in the right kind of visitors. If you were selling fruit online you wouldn’t want to waste time trying to rank highly for “fruit” or “apple” or “banana”, for example, as this too broad and people could be looking for all types of things like “how healthy is an apple” or “how to grow bananas”. The kind of keyterms you want to aim for are slightly longer tail e.g. “fruit for sale” or “buy apples” etc.

There are many directions you can go in, you may also think about seasonal ideas e.g. “apples for bobbing” for party games and Halloween or “healthy smoothie fruits” for people wanting to detox as a new years resolution.

To start off with you will need to look at the structure of the site and work down from short tail keyterms, all the way down to very specific and potentially long tail terms.

For example, if we went from the top of the imaginary fruit site all the way down to a specific apple. The site structure would follow in a similar pattern to this-

  • Homepage (links to all the different fruits- Apples, Bananas, Grapes etc.)
  • Main Apple Section (links to- eating apples, cooking apples, popular apples etc)
  • Cooking Apple Section (links to specific cooking apples- Bramley, Crab Apple, Empire etc)
  • Specific Cooking Apple Page (for example- Bramley Cooking Apple Page)

Thats a very simplistic view of a top-down site structure, but I’m sure you could replicate the same thing for your own site.

Start creating keyterm ideas for each section of the site, taking the above example, i would suggest the following ideas-

  • Homepage- “Fruit for sale”
  • Main Apple Section- “Apples for sale”
  • Cooking Apple Section- “Cooking apples for sale”
  • Specific Cooking Apple Page- “Bramley cooking apple for sale”

With your list of keyword ideas, put these into Google Adwords Keyword Tool, make sure you set the search to “Exact Match” rather than the normal “Broad Match” search.

It should then give you an idea as to how many people are searching for that phrase and show you how difficult it could be to chase after that keyterm. It will also give you a list of ideas of other keyterms people are searching, but you may have not thought of. This can be very handy as it can give you ideas for a different direction to head in. For example, instead of just selling apples, you could offer ideas for “Apple Pie Recipes” or “Cooking Apple reviews”.

Top SEO Blogs

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Here’s a great list of SEO blogs to keep you up-to-date and well informed.

http://www.seobook.com/blog

Get insight including videos, training, a forum, various tools all updated daily (pretty much). They also offer a free, best selling eBook when you sign up for their training modules.

 

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Straight from the horses mouth- Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, so if you need some stone cold facts then this is the guy I recommend you read/ speak to.

 

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog

One of the top UK SEO blogs, SEOptimise appear at many conferences and have won awards for their outstanding work in Search. Key members of staff contribute to the blog as well as other major SEO blogs.

 

http://www.seo.com/blog/

Offering daily hints and tips, this SEO blog is great for all levels of expertise. They also have a lively comments section where you can pick up even more nuggets of interesting information.

 

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

SEOmoz pump up mulitple articles on a wide range of SEO related topics throughout the day and is a great place to check up on when you start your day.

 

http://www.seo-chicks.com/

These chicks know what they’re talking about when it comes to SEO. They orignially started the blog after seeing “several offensive remarks about females in SEO”.

 

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/

Not the prettyest blog on the interenet, but when it comes to cold, hard facts, look no further than Googles own blog. Their articles range from beginner to advanced levels in a range of subjects including- search, mobile and webmaster tools.