Certified Internet Webmaster Herman Drost helps you make sure your website is spotted by the search engines. First, he explains how to use a "301 redirect" to keep high search engine rankings on Web pages you've just redesigned. Then, he explains 12 effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly website.

You've just redesigned some pages of your website. The pages have high search engine rankings that you don't want to lose. How can you safely redirect website traffic from your old pages to the new pages without losing your rankings? You can do this by using a "301 redirect."

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve your current search engine rankings when redirecting Web pages or a website. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently." After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name. You implement the 301 redirect by
creating a .htaccess file.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a Web page, your Web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

1. To create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).
   
   
2. If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing.
   
   
3. Place this code in your .htaccess file:
   
   redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm
   
   
4. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it, skip a line, then add the above code.
   
   
5. Save the .htaccess file.
   
   
6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server.
   
   
7. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you've changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

Notes: Don't add "http://www" to the first part of the statement - place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)

/old/old.htm (the original folder path and file name)

http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and file name)

When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file. The search engine spider doesn't actually read the .htaccess file, but recognizes the response from the server as valid.

During the next update, the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, plus some fluctuations in rankings. According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages.

1. To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a Unix Web server:
   
   redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
   redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
   
   You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file:
   
   redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
   redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
   redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
   
   This will redirect "index.html" to another domain using a 301-Moved permanently redirect.
   
   
2. If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you've got mod_rewrite enabled on
   your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:
   
   Options +FollowSymLinks
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^(.*).htm$ $1.html [R=301,L]
   
   or this:
   
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
   
   Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full URL for the internal linking of your site.
   
   
3. If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages and you've got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:
   
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php
   
   
4. If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes (SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file:
   
   AddType text/html .shtml
   AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
   DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

Frequently Asked Question:

What's the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect?

Meta Redirect

To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your
document:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;
url=http://mynewsite.com/">

Content="10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren't capable of using this so I'd suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them.

With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page - and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the "real visitor" after 0 or 1 seconds to the "real site" ) so using it gets you penalized.

The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only index the target URL.

Conclusion: The safest way to redirect old Web pages to the new pages or old website to the new website and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.  

Many website designers don't design their sites for the search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifully designed website may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.

Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly website:

1. Research highly targeted keywords - do this even before you begin designing otherwise you may have to go back and clean up some of your website design. Use the keyword research tool, Wordtracker to research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your website. Wordtracker will show how many people have searched for that particular keyword over several search engines within the last 60 days.

2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your Web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small number of competing websites.

3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top of each Web page. Weave your keywords within this text being careful not have them so close together that your copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines as well as your website visitors. 

4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your Web page.

5. Include Header Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.

6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has 2 purposes:

a) visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this
could help your site's rankings.

7. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your Web page will slow down the loading time of your website. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi. Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.

8. Find incoming links (backward links) - websites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for websites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more to do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your website. This means your site has a greater chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boost in its rankings.

Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page. This will increase the number of links pointing to your home page.

9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your website. It will also enable you to easily update your whole site should you wish to make any future changes.

10. Place any script code into external files - when using javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar) it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line. 

11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every Web page. A DOCTYPE ( “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of HTML you’re using for your Web pages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant Web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them. i.e.

[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"]

DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

12. Write clean html code - website editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your Web pages. Check your html code by running it through a html validator.

Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submit your site to the search engines and get ready for lots of targeted traffic.

You now have built a profitable search engine friendly website.

Resources

The Global Structure of an HTML Document

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.1

Page Validation and Loading Times

http://stoco.net/cgi-bin/wc/wc.pl

HTML Validator

http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles at: subscribe@isitebuild.com You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles
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