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While keyword redirects provide another option for reaching your website’s content through search engines, they are no longer considered ranking signals.
This is because when users click on your web pages to get more information about your business, those clicks eventually go out to Google or other search engines.
Keyword redirect methods used to be first favored by search engines, but now they have been removed from rankings.
Search engines today use numerous factors to determine what sites to show in results. Clicking on page links transfers some traffic away from other sites.
The standard explanation for why people should use URL redirection is that it improves page speed and therefore increases overall website performance.
Google even has a specific guideline regarding how to perform a redirect:
If your site has been ranked well below 100,000 pages (the average ranking of any page being around 6-7), then there’s a good chance that users will try to reach your content using error messages or tools like google webmaster tools. To help improve your website’s response time, adding a simple redirect is all you need to do.
However, this only applies if you are running an SLL (single level domain).Once you start dealing with sub-domains, things get more complicated.But as we’ll see later, websites are now built where this technique really shines.
Let’s look at some examples.
Example 1: A blogger who writes about health tips wants to increase their home health rating.They currently have a lot of traffic coming from workoutshealthtips.com and nutritionworkoutshealthtips.com.By creating a short link to each page inside a directory (folder) called /docs/home-page-ratings, they can add ads and earn money without having to write a single word.
Example 2: You’ve probably created a folder somewhere deep in your computer files that houses everything you need to share with everyone else. Go find that folder and repeat last week’s task.
More and more frequently, websites are being optimized for users who access them via mobile devices. To make your content accessible through all available channels, you’ll need to use responsive design patterns (also known as single-page applications).
A responsive application is designed so that its components scale down properly to support different input mechanisms (in this case, mobile vs desktop) without loss of quality or functionality.
More specifically, a component is only a component if it respects the context it is serving – whether it is an image or text sentence. Responsive designs utilize flexible grids along with device-width specific codes to achieve these results.
Additional benefits include reduced bandwidth and shorter loading times, due to the reduction of resource requests.
Many website owners opt for redirects when they’re trying to avoid Google penalties or hide content from customers.
Redirecting is moving content away from visitors, essentially telling them “this page no longer exists” with a new location. A redirected page can be used by existing users, but it's typically easier to create a new page and start over using redirection as your SEO strategy.
Google sometimes detects this type of behavior as deceptive marketing. As we mentioned earlier, if you have a lot of links pointing at your old site, Google may consider you to be a major authority in certain fields (which is good), but then don’t link to your original site.
If you receive a warning for bad practices, or you see no changes after signing up for a Goggle account, it’s time to look again at your website and what you’ve done so far. Make sure you’re confident in your work and that you understand why there are warnings.
It’s also a good idea to hire someone who has experience fixing these issues. That way, you can focus on giving great information and training to those working on your website.
Your website’s title tag is one of the first things visitors see when they look at your site. It’s how people find out about you online.
When someone types your keyword into their search engine, the results should be what you want them to get from your website.
Your goal is to have new users coming back to your website over and over again to actually visit your page once or become a subscriber or buyer. People are much more likely to click through to your web pages if there are relevant key words in the page titles.
Keywords are like votes for websites. If a webpage has few important key phrases, it gets rated low. And some pages that are very informational, don’t earn top ratings.
But with lots of targeted key phrases, the rating goes up and the chance rises that your website will show up in searches using those key phrases.
Don’t worry about keyword cluttering. Just focus on saying as many good key terms as possible.
Your website’s home page (also called the root directory) is accessed directly without a navigation button or an index file.
When you choose to redirect visitors, you create additional web pages that include links to other parts of your site. You can also add content such as ads and keywords.
These sub-pages use keywords when referencing files for easier search engine optimization. By having related pages with relevant content, people can find what they are looking for much faster.
To make this work, each page should have unique metadata including keyword phrases along with text and image optimised for the subject matter.
You will want all online users to be able to access these new pages from any browser, so default options like homepage or start page are not enough.
Put yourself in the reader's shoes – how would you feel if you were trying to figure out where a particular article was located? How about searching tips that tell you to tap shift key next after entering url information?
If you do not believe you can improve readability, there are free tools available that measure up your webpage. With basic reading skills, anyone can learn to be a better reader.
Even with duplicate content, you should still have good structure to your website. The best way to show search engines that your site has good structural integrity is by using internal links.
There are two types of links: external links and internal links. With an external link, some other web page connects back to yours via hyperlink.
An internal link is when a page connects directly to another page on the same level, which means all the pages between them have no higher level than they both have. It is also known as nested linking.
Internal links are one of the most important factors used by the major search engines in determining quality of a webpage. External links are where most people get their first exposure to your website.
However, what people don’t realize is that ninety percent of visitors use just the first five links to any given site. After clicking off your homepage, next likely is to click onto every article direct from the home page.
People become junkies over time – it takes more and more clicks to find out about your articles. That is why internal links are so important.
They keep popping up throughout the entire text published on your website, providing access to different sections of the site.
Moreover, without going into too much detail, each section of your site (therefore its own folder) contains links pointing to other related sites for additional information. By having these folders, when someone asks the question “What else does this site offer?” Your site will be able to provide several answers.
To sum up this segment: Internal links make your website look more trustworthy because they allow google to index parts of your website it already knows about.
You want to make sure that you have all the proper keywords, metatags, titles, and subtitles. If something’s not optimised, it’s going to keep your visitors from engaging with your content.
You want to make sure that you have all the proper keywords, metatags, titles, and subtitles. If something’s not optimised, it’s going to keep your visitors from engaging with your content.
Make sure you have no errors on your page. Also, use preview to check how things appear on your screen. Once you get someone else looking at your work, you can pick up some bad habits like cropping too much out of your image.
Have you updated your pages lately? Most people will avoid downloading anything (apps, videos, etc.) until they’re sure it’s good quality. Let others know what you’ve been doing by linking to this post from other sites.
After you have selected your redirection method, set up the redirect URL (the address of the page where visitors are redirected after they click on your old link) and add a meta tag to your website linking to that URL.
If you’re doing this yourself, make sure there is one clear guide on how to do it. You can use either html or php; but if you choose the latter route, don’t forget to activate the “rewrite engine” as well!
When putting together your redirection plan, start with the bottom range of the homepage and work your way up. It’s easier to replicate the exact same content at the top of the site than it is for the lower ranges.
The higher up you get, the more difficult it becomes to change what comes after you. Preferably, let teams of people work through these changes instead of attempting them alone.
That said, you will need to be knowledgeable about web development standards and techniques to ensure that your redirects run properly.
A common source of confusion is punctuation. The comma before the closing bracket } of an attribute value needs to be a decimal place so that the browser knows to ignore the missing quote before the word ‘value’. Otherwise, some browsers will treat the two occurrences of value as separate words.
At minimum, you should replace the asterisks (*) with dots (. ) since most developers agree that dot is faster to type than the *). Additionally, many SEO’s recommend replacing the underscores(_)with dots because the search engines favor dots over dashes.
Finally, you want to make sure that your password security isn’t compromised by any redirect plugins or codes. Search your plugin directory for hidden links to websites and see for yourself why many professional WordPress users disable automated redirect mechanisms.
