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What's in a name? 301 Redirection

Search Engines have more and more dominance in determining the success or failure of many web based ventures. Nearly 85 percent of all website traffic is generated from search engines.

Marketing with domain names can help direct traffic to your site.
For a lot of organizations, having 3 or 4 domain names that point to your website can help your visitors and customers find you. Here are some common uses of marketing domains:

You have you have multiple keyword rich domain names you would like to have pointed to a single site
A word in your domain name is plural, you want the singular as well
Your primary domain name is long. You want something easier for people to remember and type.
There is confusion as to how to spell your domain name. You want people to be able to find you even if they aren't sure how to spell your name.
You run businesses under multiple names but have only one website.

Since search engines may penalize your site for what is known as "duplicate content", it is necessary to set these extra domain names up as 301 redirects. This tells the search engines that these are not seperate web entities, but one and the same.

A 301 Redirect, a.k.a. "permanant redirect", has many uses in regards to both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and "human optimization" for your website. Basically, a 301 redirect takes a url (www.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/page.html) and tells a browser or search engine spider to permanantly redirect to another url. It also tells the search engines that the destination url should inherit the "reputation" of the url being redirected. Below, we discuss some of the reasons this is a very usefull tool.

SEO, web surfers, and 301

For potential visitors to your site, you want an easily remembered domain name that is still relevant to your business. If your business name is United International Technologies, Inc, that would make for a cumbersome and hard to remember domain name, though still one that you would want to keep. Combining multiple domain names and 301 redirects, you can register unitedinternationaltechnologies.com and set that as your primary domain name. You can then register globaltech.com (provided it is availalble) and set it as a 301 redirect, thus making it easier for people to remember your domain.

Removed Pages
Eventually, you may rename or remove pages from your website. This can become a problem if search engines have indexed that page and given it a good ranking, or if visitors have bookmarked that page. With a 301 redirect, if a visitor clicks to a page that has been renamed or removed, you can redirect the request to a new page. This decreases the chance of a visitor leaving your site and makes sure that any search engine rankings will be inherited by the new page.

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What's in a name? 301 Redirection

SEO, web surfers, and 301