If you have purchased a new domain and need to redirect old website or blog to a new website, you need to consider applying 301 permanent redirect. It will help you not to lose rankings in search engines. You can simply ask your web host o do the job for you. Luckily, my web host provides all the technical services for free. I am now using site5 hosting. However, if you need to set up anually, it will be very hectic for you, especially for newbies.

Single Page Redirect

You can consider this code when you are redirecting a single static page. All you need to do is put the code in your index.php file, and if there is any other code, put this one below by giving a space like pa paragraph.

?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.yournewdomainhere.com/page.html");
exit();
?>

Canonical Redirect

The canonical 301 redirect will help you add or remove www to all the pages. This code will redirect without www domain to www like seotipss.com to www.seotipss.com.  u can replace the code with your desired address.

<?php
if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']
.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
?>

.htaccess Single Page Redirect

You need to edit your .htaccess file and you can create a backup by downloading the file from File Zilla. You can find the .htaccess file in your root directory or if you are using wordpress you can find it in public_html folder.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.yourdomainhere.com/newpage.htm

.htaccess Canonical Redirect

It is the same process you just need to put the code in .htaccess file. It will redirect users from without www to www domain.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomainhere.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainhere.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

This will help you to set up 301 redirect on your blogs and website. I recommend that you use a webhost that provides all these services for free. It might be very confusing for newbies, as it was for me. Try to use the tools available in your webhost cpanel. Usually there are few options from where you can do this manually without using all the above codes.

Why we need 301 redirect? It will help you in search engines not to lose rankings. It is advisable before you make any change backup any data you have on your website. I lost my all the data of one blog before I asked my web host do the job for me. If you don’t have any idea, I would suggest you hire someone who is expert in handling the job. It is much better to pay someone rather losing all your important data on your website.

There is a lot of discussion about SEO experts and people are curious about this issue they always ask questions from experts what should we do to become  successful SEO Expert or SEO professional. I will guide you in simplest way so that you learn everything and know what actually SEO experts do.

Do Not Overestimate

You might have noticed each day many newbie’s enter into this field and they tell everyone that they are SEO experts. If you are a newbie and you are reading this, ask yourself do you know the basics of SEO? You can read the Google SEO starter guide for this reference. Being an SEO expert and just a link builder is two different things and why I am saying this because once I posted a job opening for SEO expert. And I interviewed several candidates and they were saying we can do directory submissions, link exchanges, social bookmarking, forums, blogs etc. If you know all these things, then it is good, but you need to learn more and more before you can say you are an SEO expert.

Do Not Underestimate

This thing applies to newbies and some of the experts out there as well. I always underestimate my SEO skills; hence I am always reading opinions on different blogs. You might be very good in SEO; you need to practice your skills on your websites and blogs. I never build links for my own blogs because I try to get Link Baits (which I will explain later).

Do Not Over Optimize

Most of the people over optimize their website and it is harmful rather than giving you any benefit. Always focus on quality rather than quantity and when it comes to link building, 10 high PR back links are much better than 100 back links with no PR.

You Love Blog Commenting

If you ask SEO people, what do they think about blog commenting? Most of the people think it is a good way of building back links. I would say blog commenting is the worst thing to get back links, as Google track all the spam comments and penalize those websites. You can read Google blog post about spam comments here. If you are just commenting for the purpose of getting back link, it will turn in your favour. And mostly people add keywords in the “name” field. Only low quality blogs will approve your comments or those which allow comment spam.

Content Is Always King

The famous saying is “Content is always King” and still content is king. Search engines love the fresh and new content. You can invest on creating content rather than building links. If you want to be an SEO expert, focus on content more than link building because good content will automatically get you back links as other websites will link to yours’. If you cannot write in native English, try using different grammatical and spell checking softwares to proofread your content. Good content will get you link baits as well.

Always Follow Simple Ways

You do not have to look for extra and unique techniques for SEO. If there would be any changes, Google will update their SEO starter guide. The simpler you are in SEO the more chances that you will become an SEO expert. Read some good SEO books like “The Art of SEO”, it is a very good book for everyone to get the understanding of SEO and search engine terms. Start from On Page SEO and get a good grip on it because if you do it right, you will complete 80% of SEO on your website.

Link Bait

As I have mentioned earlier “Content is Always King”, link baiting is getting natural links to your website. If you write a good informative post or an article with a little bit of research, you will get link bait from other websites. People will give reference to your websites, blogs and use it in forums to guide other people. Now again many people do not know what is link bait, as I once asked an SEO expert in Digital Point forums about link bait and after hearing the answer I was surprised. He said “Link bait I don’t know maybe it is black hat never tried this”.

I hope these simple tips will help you to get a grip on SEO and you can try the book I have referred “The Art of SEO”. If you want to add something, please comment.

There is one thing you should keep in mind never use same anchor text on too many forums, like if you have used the anchor text in 200 forums then change it for other forums because it might look like auto postings or submissions. Forums signatures are good for traffic as well; if you have something useful in your anchor text people will visit your website. Forums signatures are counted as only 1 back link, if you have made 500 posts in forum and you are a regular member, it does not mean you have 500 back links only 1 link will be counted as back link. Usually forums are good for traffic rather than back links, there is also one more thing only do follow forums will give you benefit of back link. If you have joined no follow forums then there is no value of signatures other than traffic you get from your signatures.

What Google Prefer?

Google do look for unique and comprehensive Meta description, it will show in search results as a snippet. It does not mean that Google does not use any Meta tags; they do use title tag and Meta description. Meta description needs to be unique and does not contain keywords separated by commas. I have seen many Meta descriptions in which people are putting keywords that they want to target. Use the one keyword describing the brand or services will help you more rather than stuffing keywords in Meta description. If you are putting too many keywords in description it would look like spam. Many people are using and targeting the same keywords, if you are putting the keywords; it won’t look unique to search engines or Google. Good Meta description is considered to be about 250 words maximum, containing the brand or services information about the website or blog. You can also explain what you website is all about, for example if you look at my blog meta description by viewing the page source, you will notice that there is no keywords stuffing just a detailed explanation what this blog is about. I have used 2 of my targeted keywords in the description in such a way that they don’t look like spam description. Keep these seo tips with you so that you can make your Meta tags more useful for targeting keywords.