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One of the worst things that can happen to your site is to have an Internet user try to locate it through the use of the search engines and they encounter a “page not found” or a “404” error screen, simply because you changed the content or moved the page and
you forgot to provide a way for your them to find what they were looking for.

This can be disastrous for your business as well as your website rankings. Keep in mind that it is very easy for people to click away and go to another, more accessible and easier to find website.

One way that you can actually prevent this from happening is by providing them with a 301 redirect that will basically lead them to the location of your new URL even if they try to access your old URL that they found on search engines.

What is a 301 Redirect?

Before anything else, we first need to discuss what a 301 redirect is in order for you to get a better idea as to what steps you need to take for the entire process.

A 301 redirect, or a permanent URL move, is actually the most efficient, and the only acceptable means of redirecting URLs or web pages from a search engine standpoint. Using other types of redirecting can get you in trouble with most search engines, so if you want to preserve your search engine rankings, make sure to use this type of redirect if you are planning to move pages or content on your site.

When do you need to use a 301 Redirect?

When you decide to retire an old page, change a link or folder name, or you just need to move page positions around on your server. That is the time that you should use a 301 redirect since it will help you preserve your site’s page ranking in search engines. Using the 301 redirect basically lets the search engines know that all links currently on the web will now belong to a new web page.

This is also a great tool if you want to consolidate websites and avoid duplication. It can also be useful when you have affiliate sites linked to your home page’s unique URL since you will be able to let the search engine spiders know that these affiliate sites are actually the same page.

This can actually benefit your site’s search engine page rankings since you get credited for the other affiliated links to your site, while preventing the search engine robots from indexing them, creating duplicate contents in its database.

Another good place to use this type of redirect is if you have purchased or shut down another website that is still receiving traffic. You can simply use the 301 redirect to get all of the traffic going to the other site redirected to your main site instead.

You can actually achieve the same type of redirecting process using other types of redirects, such as a 302 redirect, Java script redirect, or a meta refresh. These will be able to redirect traffic to your site just like a 301 redirect, but only the 301 redirect will inform the search engines that the other sites actually belong to you, thereby avoiding any problems that may arise later on, such as getting flagged for having duplicate content.

There are a number of ways that you can use the 301 redirect, depending on what you need to redirect and where you need it to go. The most common type is to redirect your old URL to a new one. To do this all you have to do is go to the control panel of your web host, and select the “redirect” option from there. Then fill in the blanks with the necessary information and select the “permanent” redirect option to activate the 301 redirect.

I hope that you have a better understanding of how you can use 301 redirects to preserve your search engine rankings, but remember it is up to you to keep up to date with all of the different SEO methods as your site grows and changes.

If you want your business or website to get and maintain a high page ranking in the search engines, you need to continually review and improve your education to include both the standard and new strategies that will help you achieve your goals.

Keep in mind that mastering search engine optimization is crucial if you want to have a competitive edge against other sites or businesses that offer the same type of services or content as you.

The better your search engine page ranking is, the better chances you have of getting high volumes of traffic to your web page or website. Higher volumes of traffic can lead to a higher number of possible customers, translating in to higher profit for you.

Today we are going to revisit some strategies that we have discussed before and touch on some that we haven’t,  so that you can implement them and get high page rankings and maintain them.

First things first if you don’t have a quality web hosting provider you should probably find one. You need to have a reliable web hosting service that will guarantee that your site is up and running 99% of the time and will give you the ability to assign an independent and unique IP address to every domain you want to rank well.

This will help ensure that your avoid any problems, like all of your sites getting knocked out of the search engine database after they have been visited by crawlers during the time that one of them was down or if one of your sites happens to get penalized and removed your other sites won’t suffer the same fate.

Yes we are going to talk about keyword use again!

This is one of the more common, but nonetheless important, SEO strategies that you should learn in order to fully reap the benefits of all of your hard work getting your site listed and ranked.

Make sure that you choose the good keywords to use in your site’s content, from the title to the body. It is important that you place your best keywords in your title or tags.

You don’t need to put them on every page of your site, but only on those pages that are relevant to that particular keyword. Let’s say that the keyword that you decided to use is the word “ipod nano sale”, make sure that you only link it to your site content that has its focus on the ipod nano sale, so when you direct traffic to your site using that keyword, they will come across your site’s content about the ipod nano’s that are on sale.

Creating links will also help direct traffic to your site, thereby improving your chances of getting more possible visitors and customers for your business.

However, linking to other sites is not necessarily enough to get them to visit your site. What you can do is to actually makesure that you are using your selected keywords in the text links that will help point to the content located within your site. This way, if people are looking for particular content, they will be directed to your site from the content pertaining to the keyword that they are looking for.

The more pages that you have on your site, the more chances you have of getting your content discovered by your potential visitors and the more opportunity you have to increase your keyword choices and density.

One way that you can keep your page volume up is by simply creating new content every week, offering a different perspective, if not new, on a particular topic or keyword that you have on your other pages. This will help improve your chances of making content that has some relevance to what the users are looking for when they chose to visit your site using keyword links.

While having a lot of pages can help improve the chances of having increased traffic to your site, if your site cannot offer quality and relevant content on what the visitors are looking for, then the they will simply click back to the search engine and look for a site that does. As you can guess this has an adverse effects on your page ranking.

Search engines will take note of this, and will perceive this that the visitors did not find anything relevant in your content and often penalize you for it with lower rankings.

Some people follow the book carefully when it comes to SEO. However, you have to understand that there are common myths that may be detrimental to the growth of your website.

Some of the approaches that used to be effective before may no longer be useful today, since the market and search engine spiders keep getting smarter.

Once you recognize these basic myths you can make the necessary improvements on your site to boost your rankings.

Myth #1 – SEO involves techniques that will fool the search engines.

Fooling the search engines also means that you are also fooling your human users. Real SEO techniques involve more than just optimizing content, using marketing techniques and getting additional links. A number of tactics can be used depending on the market you are trying to reach.

Some of the strategies that can be used for SEO will produce long time results including benchmarks, competitive analysis, search marketing, keyword analysis, web design, user
experience, creative copy writing, server side issues, ongoing link building, code optimization, information architecture, ongoing content development, web analytics and SEO and conversion analysis.

Myth #2 – Search engines aren’t really used that much.

Based on research, around 4.9 billion searches are done every month by 133 million unique searchers. Search engines have become one of the most common tools used by people all over the world when they are seeking information.

The majority of Internet users rely on search engines to get to different web sites, pages and companies. Search engines lead you to different online businesses and shops where you can instantly shop and get the information you are looking for.

To be successful with your SEO campaign you have to determine how much useful and relevant content is available in the market, then focus on becoming an authority on that topic.

Myth #3 – SEO doesn’t work because you don’t have very many visitors.

Keep in mind that SEO doesn’t promise instant and significant results. You have to use the different marketing tools and strategies together with the approaches and SEO to make
everything work together. Experts recommend that you spend about 6 months after the implementation phase to evaluate the results of SEO.

You also have to ensure that your web site can back up all the methods you have incorporated. If your site is not easy to navigate, does not have sound and unique content and is not relevant to the people you are targeting, then your SEO efforts will be rendered useless.

Myth #4: SEO is something you only have to do once.

SEO takes time to develop and you need to evaluate and assess each approach that you are taking frequently to determine if they should be improved. Search engines view about 100 to 200 factors or when they visit your website to decide how to categorized your search results.

It is very important that you continue to seek out and improve your techniques. It is also a good idea to integrate your SEO campaign with your other offline and online marketing campaigns. You can do this by creating new content, building new links and refining
your optimization approaches.

If you have spent time, money and effort creating the groundwork for your SEO campaign you must take the time to ensure that it continues to function and drive the right visitors to your web site.

SEO is not a one time event. You have to keep an eye on your site ranking, keep track of the search engine rules and make need adjustments every now and then if you want your SEO campaign to be a success.

The entire search engine optimization process is often misunderstood by a lot of people, which is why they oftencommit a lot of SEO mistakes as we have discussed before.

These mistakes can cost them not only their page ranking in search engines, but also their traffic volume of possible customers. As you know SEO can help you direct traffic to your site, but getting them to stay is a whole new different ball game.

The entire SEO process basically revolves around the idea of getting a good page ranking in search engines by employing certain strategies so that people can find your site easier. The better your page ranking is, the easier it is for visitors to find it, the more appealing it is for them to visit your site, thereby increasing the amount of traffic that your site is able to generate. However, if the visitors do not find any relevant content in your site, then your efforts to get them to your site would just have been in vain.

If you want to ensure that you can get visitors to stay on your site, you must learn some basic content strategies.

As I mentioned earlier, getting people to your site is one thing, but to getting them to stay is another.

When visitors are looking for a specific content, they will perform keyword searches on search engines. Once they are directed to your site using those keywords, they expect to find relevant content pertaining to that keyword, so make sure that you have content or
you will lose them as fast as they found you.

Avoid using keywords that have no relevance to your content. Using them anyway simply to gain more traffic to your site only based of the popularity of the keyword will only result in visitors clicking back to their search engines, and won’t necessarily have any positive effect on your page ranking.

The more content or articles you create about a particular topic or keyword, the more chances you have of getting tagged and linked by other sites, as well as increase your chances of answering a visitor’s search for relevant content. Just like fishing, the more bait you have, the better your chances are of catching a fish.

You also want to create articles and post them on other sites so that you can generate a lot of back links which can lead even more people back to your site.

Creating and posting new content regularly can greatly improve your site’s chances of getting recommendations from other sites, especially those that are linked to your site. The more times you offer new and fresh content, the more opportunities your visitors
searching for a particular content will have on finding one that is relevant to their search.

Building links is also another content strategy that you can employ to help visitors searching for a particular content to find your site offering relevant content to their search. Try to link to other sites that have similar content, or at least uses the same keywords in tagging their site’s content.

This way, any visitor searching on those sites will be directed to your site’s similar content, making it easier for them to find you.

There are so many methods available when it comes to search engine optimization that webmasters have actually categorized them in to two types, white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

There are certain SEO tactics are accepted and those that are not accepted by popular search engines when it comes to optimizing your website and getting free traffic from them.

There is white hat SEO and it best described as methods that follow the guidelines and stipulations set by the search engines.

Black hat SEO is best described as approaches that go against the guidelines and stipulations set by the search engines and that they disapprove of.

There is an ongoing battle between individuals who use white hat and black hat SEO.  Black hat SEO may not be what you can immediately consider as negative ethically. The fact is search engines may be manipulated by black hat practitioners, and according to them the approaches they use are highly acceptable and their sole intent is boosting site rankings.

Black hatters also say that there is no good or bad in trying to achieve the same goal of making their site relevant and ranked high. The benefits can extend to the users as they seek for the most useful information. Some big search engines may allow a number of websites to function opposite to the stated rules, but is it really worth the risk?

Cloaking is one of the allowed black hat methods that a lot of webmasters use. A cloaking policy may be enforced by big search engines, but still needs updating to fully become
consistent. The cloaking method is accepted by the search engines, since it does improve user searches instead of provide them with just any kind of result. Cloaking cannot immediately be referred to as a negative influence, considering that it aids searchers in getting the information and websites that they need.

There are a number of methods that you should avoid if you want to rank high and get on search engines’ good side. Invisible text should be avoided. Do not place light yellow or white text against a white background. Engines can detect these and will only put you in more trouble. Avoid keyword stuffing. In the past, overstuffing articles and site content with the same keyword may help improve ranking, but search engines are smarter now and can determine if your content is natural or no longer of good quality.

As we know automated robots visit every page in the index. The content is acquired to be analyzed at a later time. Cloaking involves giving the automated robot a different page, while assigning a completely new one to human users. Search engines greatly detest this practice. You should also stay away from doorway pages.

Doorway pages are described as trying to create a page to rank high on search engines, but truly having no real good content. Orphaned pages may also be considered as  doorway pages by search engines and they can incur penalties.

As we have discussed before you want to avoid spamming. One method of spam is by putting up useless pages with no content that is just created to rank high on search engines.

Ultimately the type of hat you wear when you optimize your website is completely up to you, so you have to make the decision weather or not you want put on your white hat to play it safe or wear the black hat and risk it all!