Understanding 301 and 302 Url Redirects

Its been a minute since I have written any content on AskMichaelHart.com since I have been so busy with my SEO internship developing content for AtlantaSharpCopiers.com, a blog created to help boost rankings for my current client, Southern Office Machines, also currently under redesign. (If any of you are looking to lease or purchase a copier in Atlanta, these guys have been around since 1985 and do a great job on customer service, fyi)

Anyway, I wanted talk a bit about url redirects. You may be wondering what the heck is a url redirect? Good question.

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding and the very similar technique of domain redirection, (also called domain forwarding) on the web for making a web page available under many URLs. (If you don’t know what a url is, it stands for uniform resource locator, aka domain name, aka web address, aka www.yourwebsite.com)

A web browser user might mis-type a URL—for example, “exampel.com” and “exmaple.com”. Organizations often register these “mis-spelled” domains and re-direct them to the “correct” location: example.com. For example: the addresses example.com and example.net could both redirect to a single domain, or web page, such as example.org. This technique is often used to “reserve” other Top Level Domains with the same name, or make it easier for a true “.edu” or “.net” to redirect to a more recognizable “.com” domain.

A web page may be redirected for several reasons:

* A web site might need to change its domain name.
* An author might move his or her pages to a new domain.
* Two web sites might merge.

With URL redirects, incoming links to an outdated URL can be sent to the correct location. These links might be from other sites that have not realized that there is a change or from bookmarks/favorites that users have saved in their browsers.

What you may not know is that a 301 redirect is moved permanently and should be seen as a link. A 302 found/moved temporarily might be seen as a link.

Sometimes you might not want a page to be indexed for security reasons. This can be done by altering your robots.txt file. You can specify noindex, nofollow, or noarchive. In addition, you can block affiliate tracking scripts via robots.txt by using -disallow:/afftrack.cgi.

Another type of redirect is the www vs the non www. Search engines will index http://yourwebsite.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com . This is bad since google punishes duplicate content. (Think of it as a nagging housewife that repeats the same instructions over and over )

The solution to better rankings is to include code in your .htaaccess file which is in the root directory of your website to tell the spider or browser to always redirect to your web address with the www included everytime so there are not duplicate pages and a lower search engine ranking.

The code is simple. Within your .htaaccess file you would type:

ReWriteEngine on
ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

It should not affect subdomains at all. Redirection can be applied to many duplicate content problems as well as other link issues. Redirection can also make links untrackable as links pointing through multiple redirects MAY NOT show up as links to the target URL.

Now, what if you have a broken link on your page and it renders a 404 not found page? Easy. Customize your 404 page with some content to appear so redirect people back to your primary category or related links. Alot of internet marketers use 404 pages to recommend related products on their site and have excellent increased conversions. You could also show a search box, sitemap, or link back to your homepage. Regardless, you need to fix those links.

I’ll talk about custom 404 pages in a future post.

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So what’s the benefit when you read everything you can read about SEO and then you realize all the top guys you have learned from are repeating themselves and demonstrate a life changing profitability in their online companies? Peace of mind.

I’ve studed SEO like it was oxygen for my existence but mainly because its interesting because once applied can change the lives of every business you interact with. And that’s just enjoyable when you can enhance someone’s business and lifestyle. I also enjoy it because its sales and isn’t that the bottomline in every business..to make sales? Its enjoyable to grow relationships and educate people on critical information. All a part of growing a new blog I’ll be writing, Maven Entrepreneur

The fun part about making all these sites is that I get to test different things. For example, making small tests that have improved rankings. Your url keywords are important for making a smaller site begin to show rankings if its very relevant so three or more keywords is pretty easy to rank for. But its important that your pages retain content. What is content? Words! Sentences written in a logical order that make sentence and describe something. Filling that content with links and descriptive changing yet related anchor text diversifies your website from a robot perspective.

If you forget everything else in this article and realize two key things:

1-PageRank-

and

2-Link Reputation you have 90% of SEO down.

Its the implementation and architecture of how you compose your SEO strategy that makes the difference in your success. Its interesting how I just create a structure that makes it optimize better. All I really do is have the keywords repeated on every page for the title text, meta description, anchor text, breadcrumb navigation, and inside the actual body content (text). Then you repeat that on 60 to 100 different related pages and content and you start to rank so much higher.

A more advanced seo strategy is to automatic the growth of your keyword rich pages. How about a forum? A forum where people have a reason to come back and everytime a post is made you have pages duplicated and that just increases your page rank. Or a blog. Blogging is getting easier and more social in similar to a forums in some ways. Its an excellent shortterm strategy to grow exchanged links between sites and the search robots index them faster since the content is updated more often.

Again, your never ending  strategy is  increasing the number of links from inside the website via internal pages and then external pages.

Now with social media and video you can have your own little tv show. How did Soldier boy get found? On youtube. Retarded, isn’t it?

Video indexes faster than blogs and its yet another medium to be taken over as people search for television rather than television attacking us with their 20 extra decibels louder and obnoxious commercials about crap we just don’t care to hear or watch.

Thank you permission marketing for saving my life

Please comment if you liked this article.

Anyway,

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Tuesday, 01 Sep 2009

Companies may want to consider how their SEO plays out on the world stage

When companies begin to use search engine optimization (SEO) to increase their online presence they often just think about optimizing for Google, but new figures from comScore show that companies that sell in the world market may want to consider some alternative search engines.

According to the most recent figures released from comScore, global searches now exceed more than 100 billion each month and while Google still makes up the vast majority of searches, a number of other sites are seeing their use increase - including some located outside of the U.S.

The statistics show that more than 113 billion searches were conducted across the globe in July - a 41percent increase over July of 2008. And while it’s no shock that Google and Yahoo are in the number one and two spots, Baidu.com, a Chinese search engine, comes in third on the list - ahead of Microsoft’s sites.

But the biggest market to watch for might be Russia as Yandex, a Russian search engine, saw the biggest growth in the last year, increasing from 663 million searches last year to almost 1.3 billion in July - a 94 percent increase.

Using search engine optimization (SEO) for only an American market might be a bad move for many companies as comScore finds that both Europe and the Asia Pacific region have a larger percentage of the search engine market. Original link here

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Search Engine Optimization has always fascinated me. With the ever changing algorithms many people get frustrated and feel helpless with how arbitrary a search engine may change, but in reality its always been for the good, and if you stick to true white hat seo, it will pay off in the long run for your business. So let’s get right down to it.

When the search engine spiders come across your website, they are looking for 12  key things.

#1 Relevant keywords in your domain or web address. If your keywords are in the actual web address, great. I have maintained a one page website for its keywords primariliy because it has little competition, but it supports my theory. I could not register MichaelHart.com so I registered AskMichaelHart.com Now since my name is very popular throughout the world, I had to optimize my on page factors to help boost my ranking.

#2 Your Title Text - You are limited to somewhere around 68 characters for your title text before it cuts off. Your most important keyword should come first, followed by the next important keywords. The title text is what appears at the top of your browser window to tell you what page you are on. You must have varying title text on every page for proper SEO optimization.

#3 H1-H6 Tags - These are your heading tags. The higher the number, the larger the text. H1 takes priority over h2 which is smaller text, and h2 takes priority over h3, and so on. Use headings to split up a long document, or to tell a story if you write a long sales page so it makes your reader go back to the top to read your entire article. I find many of my h1 tags ranking in Google because of its high priority in google’s algorithm

#4 Meta tag description - This belongs inside the header of your document after and before the closing tag Write your description like an ad and include your keywords in the flow of your sentence. These are extremely important to catch the reader’s attention but you do not want to spam it with keywords over and over. Don’t forget your readers are human, not robots!

#5 Anchor text - Anchor text keywords are extremely important because you can and must swap them up in varying ways if you link to the same domain name. If I want to rank as an SEO specialist, I would have something like <a href=”http://www.AskMichaelHart.com”>SEO Specialist</a> and a href=”http://www.AskMichaelHart.com”>SEO Consultant</a> in other areas of my body content so different keywords would be linked to the same domain.  Having too many similar anchor text can devalue your rankings in the search engines and could be devalued as spam so be careful!

#6 Meta tag keywords - These are not as important as they once were. Since so many people abused this and did keyword stuffing, Google devalued its ranking but you should still include related keywords in this listing. I still have sites rank for words that appear so don’t be lazy. Just don’t place too much emphasis.

#7 Relevant sites linking back to you - Everyone knows this.  You want to have sites related to your content linking back to your site with varying anchor text. Ultimately the site with the most links usually wins, and Google places great emphasis upon sites that have many relevant links to each other.

#8 Social networking and bookmarking sites - With social networking sites, web 2.0 has made it easier to rank for related content by allowing videos, profiles, and more to have related keywords included.  Linking to your website from popular authority websites place a major role in boosting your SERPS, so don’t leave any of them out! Even creating a Google document on googledocs and linking to your site helps share pagerank from google to your site, so don’t miss out on this obvious secret.

#9  Good relevant content - Generally you want to have each webpage contain at least 100 words on each page. The more the better.  Mix up the variety of your keywords in your sentences with varying anchor text deep linking to other pages within your website.  Creating this web of entanglement can only help you, so the more content you have, the better!

#10 Sitemap Creating a sitemap is easy and automated now. Its simply an index of every page on your website so that the robot can quickly go to the sitemap and index every page. This is a must have backbone to rank properly for longterm success.

Also:

#11 Test - You want to test everything. Create 2 similar pages but with different title text. See which one is searched for more from your search queries and create pages based upon what users typed into the search engines to find your site.

Google Analytics = In caes you don’t know how to find the searches for your website,  place google analytics code on your webpages you want to track and sign up for the account. Its free and well worth the strategy of knowing where your visitors go, what pages have the highest bounce rate, and so much more.

In conclusion, I hope you found this article informative.  This is Day 1 of my SEO tips. If you liked the article, please share it with someone. Its only a click away.

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If you have maintained a blog or website of any kind you have the obvious realization that without targeted traffic to your website, your website is an obscure digital dust collector. Maybe as a newbie you have even paid for the cheap offers of sending 500,000 to 1,000,000 hits of “people” to your website for $50. (That is a total hoax by the way; its complete spam that no one reads or its bots that “hit” your website but its not actually a human visitor.)

This is the beginning of a series of blog posts I will provide to teach simple web 2.0 tactics to start driving traffic to your website, and yes for free. All you have to invest is some time.

What is Web 2.0 and How Can It Help Me?

Its been speculated that only 40% of emails are read by suscribers on email lists, and that email is becoming something used only by the younger generation to respond to parents or “older” people. So what is the younger generation using now? Social networks of course.

Popular websites like:
Facebook.com,
Myspace.com,
Linkedin.com
LiveJournal.com
Ning.com
Bebo.com,
Friendster.com,
Ecademy.com,
Ryze.com,
HubPages.com,
OneWorldTv.com
Wordpress.com (what I’m using),
and many other social networking websites out there allow users to interact with friends, post links and videos, and easily share information with each other. With the Iphone and other cellphones making it easier to share information with each other, its no wonder how quickly technology changes to shift the new generation into sharing information with such ease that email seems like an extra task at times.
Then consider social bookmarking sites like:
* Balatarin
* BookmarkSync
* CiteULike
* ClickHereDummy!
* Connotea
* Delicious
* Digg
* Diigo
* Faves
* GiveALink.org
* IBM Lotus Connections
* Jumper 2.0 Enterprise
* Linkwad
* Ma.gnolia
* My Web
* Mister Wong
* Mixx
* MSDN
* Newsvine
* oneview
* Propeller.com
* Reddit
* Simpy
* SiteBar
* StumbleUpon
*Squidoo
* TechNet
* Twine[1]
* Windows Live Favorites
* Yattle
and you’ve got quite an opportunity to generate profiles, all considered “authority” websites by the search engines as high ranking due to the large amount of traffic and visits by robots indexed the millions of pages online.

Simply taking the time to create profiles that link to your website will generate an enormous amount of pagerank and traffic to your website. Its not rocket science folks. If you even create 5 of 10 profiles that link to your site, you would be amazing at how much it can help you send traffic to your site.

Tomorrow will be day 2 of traffic building techniques on how to use video to boost your traffic and conversion rates. Here’s a little secret: Some 52% of web traffic today is video. What would you rather do, read a long sales page, or just watch a video with someone explaining their product or idea?

If you enjoyed this article, please post a pingback or vote on one of the many social networking and bookmarking sites I shared with you tonight!

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This section will answer questions to search engine optimization techniques.

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