Technical SEO

In order to achieve high rankings on all popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN<, you will have to pay special attention to some technical SEO issues which are listed here. See Advanced SEO

• Proper use of robots.txt
• Preserving Page rank while renaming URLs
• The best use of robots.txt file on the server is in those cases when you explicitly want to instruct the crawler not to crawl some portion of your site's content. So whenever you use robots.txt, make sure that you are not accidentally blocking the GoogleBot to crawl your important pages.
• Whenever you start the SEO activities on an existing site, there might be a need to rename or move the pages. The best way to retain the existing rank of pages is to use a "301 Redirect". There are other ways to redirect users but the 301 redirect is a search engine friendly method to rename or move web pages.
• This method works for moving domains too. For this purpose you will be requiring a permanent redirect on your old site to instruct the visitors and search engine spiders that your site has been moved.
• You can also use a 301 redirect to get away from having a duplicate content penalty. For this purpose you will have to use a 301 redirect on your extra domain and point to your actual domain.

How to perform a 301 redirect?

• The code for a 301 redirect is placed inside a special file named .htaccess file, which resides at the root level or it can be placed at a local level. If this file doesn't exist then you can create one with any text editor like notepad.
• The process of 301 redirect is very easy and simple. Open the .htaccess file and add the following line:
• redirect 301 /olddirectory/oldpage.html http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.html
• You need to validate the 301 redirect implementation with a server header check to make sure that the old page returns a 301 redirect to the new page accurately.