301 Permanent or 302 Temporary Redirect?

Redirects are used to ‘redirect’ website visitors from one URL (page) to another. The reasons for doing so vary – you may be changing your domain name or redirecting newly purchased domain name to an existing one, changing structure of your website, temporarily disabling access to an old page.

The most commonly used redirects are 301 Permanent and 302 Temporary redirects.

301 (Permanent) Redirect – means that a URL has been permanently moved to a new one. From a search engines point of view, a 301 redirect ‘informs’ search engines that the old page is permanently redirected to a new page and the old URL will not be used anymore. As a result, search engines will re-index the new URLs.

302 (Temporary) Redirect – means that the URL has been only temporarily redirected to a new URL and is likely to change again soon.

It is recommended to use 301 Permanent Redirect for all redirects that are meant to be ‘permanent’. Search engines look at the destination (new) URL as the one to be indexed and shown on the search results pages. The important benefit is that the (external) link popularity and reputation assigned to an existing (old) page will be passed on to a new page, if permanent redirect is used.

Starting with Link Building?

The importance of link building – obtaining external links is in their ‘ability’ to inform search engines about the content of a destination page (Google especially). Search engine bots crawl the Internet, follow links and assign value to each link based on its relevancy, quality of page they are located on, and the text used when linking.

To keep this all simple: search in Google for ‘click here’ keyword phrase. Yes, Adobe is number one. Why? Well, there are many websites that link to Adobe Reader page with clickable text ‘click here’.

So the basic idea is: Get many links from pages relevant to your page, focus on pages that are popular and considered important (high Page Rank), and use clickable text with targeted keywords.

Your link building should include obtaining new links AND improving your existing links by incorporating targeted keywords into clickable text and linking to deeper level pages, not only to the homepage.

(Very) Simple Steps:

• See who links to your site => Check what page they link to => Check what link text do they use => Request changes if needed
• See who links to sites that rank higher => Request a link to your site
• Ask your business partners and even friends with (preferably relevant) websites to provide link to your site

This may sound a bit off the topic to some, but make sure your site is a good site. You cannot beat natural links. Why aren’t all ‘SEO experts’ rich by driving traffic to their web sites selling diamonds and luxury items if they are so good in optimisation? Simple answer: there has to be a really good website / business model to start with. If your website or business is of a high quality, unique and really beneficial to consumers, you are half way there. The SEO will help you to move up there in search engine listings even further. You can be doing all the SEO on low quality site, it won’t be as successful. It all starts with quality website and/or business idea.

What is SEO?

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation refers to on-site and off-site techniques and strategies with a goal to improve rankings in search engines and as a result increase traffic from search engines, called organic or natural traffic.

Do you need SEO?

Over 70% of Australians use the Internet regularly. The majority of Internet users use it to SEARCH for information. Google’s search market share is over 85% in Australia .

To put it simply, every website can be improved from an SEO point of view. There may be a very few websites that ‘do not need additional traffic’, but the vast majority of websites certainly do. Imagine a situation, when even a small changes to your website may increase your traffic significantly for many months to come. SEO is a long term strategy, meaning it requires some time for changes to take the full effect, but once those changes ‘kick-in’ the benefits are lasting.

How much do you value every additional customer or a visitor to your site?

In-house SEO vs Outsourced SEO

Certainly there are benefits of both approaches, as there are disadvantages. To highlight the most important ones:

• In-house SEO

- you have a better control over processes, it may be a cheaper option, flexibility – you may allocate resource according to need and availability

- you don’t have the expertise of specialised SEO service providers, constant changes in the SEM industry need to be addressed, SEO provider can develop and implement SEO solutions faster, SEO providers use tested SEO tools when analysing and optimising sites

• Outsourced SEO – the dis/advantages are listed above, so please find below the benefits of selecting ROKO Consulting for your SEO service needs:

- SEO Focus – over 3 years of SEO experience, with over 6 years involvement in eBusiness ‘industry’

- Work Ethics & Professional Attitude – experience working for some of the largest brands in Australia

- Cross-industry SEO Experience – preparing and implementing SEO strategies for companies in a variety of industries, including: retail, telecommunication, news & media, insurance, banking & financial services, travel and education.

Contact ROKO Consulting and find out how can you benefit from our SEO services.