Digital Footprint Media

301 redirects are like link bridges from Google or any other major search engines to your website. Let’s say you decide to simplify your URL structure or you decide to make your URL’s Search Engine friendly, these redirects are as necessary as food or water to us. A 301 redirect is a simple forwarding protocol what lets the search engine know that the URL has moved. Just as you would not want to miss any important mail, you would contact the post office to let them know you’ve moved.

Not having these redirects can be fatal to a website, from an indexation standpoint. Let’s say you were a small website with 500 URL’s and you had 385 indexed. If you were to completely restructure your url system, without 301 redirects. Overtime, Google and the other major search engines would stop displaying your URL’s as they would most likely return a 404 error.

Let’s use the example of a made up boat company xyzboatco.com. We decide to make our structure more effective with less folders and change xyzboatco.com/boats/engine/speed to xyzboatco.com/speed-boat-engines. If your initial URL was on the first page of Google and you didn’t redirect it to the later URL, overtime Google would drop that link. Google would still be sending traffic to the old link and it would result in a 404 error, which is an SEO no no.

If you are considering a URL overhaul it is absolutely imperative that you create a 301 redirect for your website, so you don’t lose all the hard work that you have put into your site.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, relevancy is the key issue. Relevancy must be taken into consideration when creating page titles, domain names, and page content. Search Engines operate in the same way as other businesses, seeking to deliver the best product to its customers. For this reason, they reward websites that bring customers back to a reliable search engine by showing their link higher in the search results. The Page Title should be keyword rich, as it must accurately represent the ensuing content. When potential customers see a page title, they should feel that it is indicative of the purpose of the content. Therefore, a precise page title is best, as generic titles can attract clicks from unwanted viewers. Domain name provides another opportunity to represent the company or the company’s product to customers. A company that sells books benefits from using the word “books” in its URL. Customers will be enticed to visit the page in search of books. Finally, the content of a page should contain appropriate amounts of keywords. Search Engine spiders and web bots search web content for keywords. Your content should therefore contain use of all keywords associated with the page, and should spread out this usage so as to encompass the entire page. Your content should also relate to your page title, and URL, in order to maximize efficiency and relevancy. If visitors to your site do not read their keyword early and often, your bounce rate will increase substantially and your website will convert inefficiently.

whocanisue.com serves as a great example for relevancy in all three aspects of a page. When the term real estate attorneys is searched for, this page (www.whocanisue.com/real-estate/) presented on the first page of Google connects me to the real estate page of the whocanisue.com website. From reading the page title of “real estate/mortgage”, I can assume that the content contains listings of real estate attorneys.  In the brief content on the front real estate page, the word “real estate” is seen six times, and the word attorney appears once. Also, the use of the word sue in the domain name demonstrates the websites purpose of connecting customers with attorneys and information on the legal process.