Often times when I redesign a website I have several things I need to look at. For starters the content and the URL structures. Recently I redesigned the TrendyHost.com website for optimization and conversions. I did this because we were lacking in a few area on our old website and that needed to be addressed and it was with the redesign.
One problem I faced was the URL structure and several outdated pages.
One solution was our .htaccess file. In that file I had to create redirects from old pages to the new to keep search engines happy and so that if a potential website visitor lands on that page they will see the updated version of that page. After about 5 pages of redirects I am now almost complete with the SEO side of the site and will begin adding more and more content to our site for our customers and browsers. We enjoy writing useful content that helps our customers in some sort of way.
In this post I want to share a small .htaccess trick which I used quite a bit when redesigning and changing the URLs of our company website. We changed the URLs for a better SEO advantage and we changed the design for more customer conversions. As a business these things are important. Especially an online business being that SEO is very important to the success of any online business.
Ok, so now on to that .htaccess trick.
Bad URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/p9876d.php
Good URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/keyword-here.php
If you decided to go from bad URL to good URL then you will open your .htaccess file and add this inside:
Redirect 301 /p9876d.php http://www.yourdomain.com/keyword-here.php[/note]
After you save your .htaccess file go to your browser and check that the old URL will redirect you to the new URL and if it does work then you can move on to the next URL. If you just change your URLs and not redirect with a 301 Google will show 404 not found and will hurt your website in rankings. Also, your potential visitors or customers will visit the URL from a search engine and end up on a 404 page which does not look good on you or your company.
Using these small tricks will make for better website rankings and better control of your website. If you have any questions feel free to comment or contact support. We also hope that you enjoy the new look of TrendyHost.com
