What is a 301 redirect?
Sites need to use a 301 redirect when they remove a page from their website. You don’t want to send the search engines or your visitors to a dead page, nor do you want inbound links pointing to that page to go to waste. A 301 redirect will reroute any links (and subsequent link juice) pointing to the dead page to a new page or existing page on your site.

If you are launching a brand new site with a new URL, it is crucial that you redirect all of the old pages and links to the new site! A huge ranking factor in SEO is the amount of trust the search engines have in your site and this trust is earned with age. A brand new site has ZERO trust with the search engines, meaning you’ll lose all of your online brand recognition, rankings and traffic if you don’t use a 301 redirect to pass the old site’s trust factor over to the new site.

I had a client once that launched a new site (without telling me first) and their traffic dropped from 15,000 unique visitors a month to barely 2,000! We are starting to see substantial visitor growth, but it isn’t anywhere near what the old site was getting.

What is a 302 redirect?
A 302 redirect is more of a temporary solution. Think of them like a “We’ll be back in 5 minutes” sign you might see in the window of a local convenience store. You would want to use a 302 redirect for a page that is temporarily unavailable, like if an e-commerce website ran out of stock for one product. You don’t want visitors trying to purchase a product that is unavailable, so you would use a 302 redirect to lead them somewhere else.

A 302 redirect is not as “SEO friendly” as a 301 redirect because it does not pass the link juice from one URL to another. This means the new page destination won’t benefit from the other page’s links. The search engines will also not remove any URL that has been 302 redirected from their index, meaning they will keep trying to crawl it.

Check out this video from Google about making the web faster:

Even though the video is a few years old (and some of their predictions have already come true!), it still has some valuable information to think about. One point in particular sticks out to me: like the developers at Google say, making faster websites means a faster web overall, which is great from the user perspective. Be honest with yourself, when you are surfing the web (not for anything in particular, just cruising along) are you willing to wait ten seconds for a page to load before you decide if it was worth the wait? How about 8 seconds? What about 5 seconds? We live in a gotta-go world where almost all of our communication is instant. If you’re not willing to wait around for a site to load, why should you expect visitors to your site to be any different?

Google has run a series of studies on site speed and the long-term effect on the end user. Basically, they realized that the longer a person had to wait for the search results to show up, the less overall searching they did overtime. Google, like every other website, is trying to increase the amount of business they do online. Your website might sell high-end culinary utensils; Google sells information. In order to keep their target audience happy, Google has done everything they can to up their site speed. (Have you noticed that they sneak in how long it took to find X listings at the top of the SERP?) If you want to keep you target audience engaged, you need to think about improving your site speed as well.

In a more recent video about site speed, Matt Cutts says “It’s always good to see if you can move a little bit faster and try to return results to users a little bit faster. It makes your website experience more fluid. It makes your users happier. There are studies that say the return on investment is definitely worth it. But at the same time, I wouldn’t stress overly about it.” To me, Matt Cutts is saying that you should focus on site speed because it directly impacts your end user, not just because it might affect how well your site ranks.

Site speed is only 1 of the 200+ ranking factors Google is currently using to rank your website, so a site that loads in 4 seconds doesn’t necessarily have an advantage over a site that loads in 6. There are a lot of other factors that come into play. However, site speed is one of those factors that website owners can easily improve, and it’s worth doing so when possible.

Here are a few suggestions that you can implement that can significantly decrease the overall bounce rate of your website:

Redesign: When was the last time you had your website redesigned? If it has been more than 5 years chances are you need to re-approach the design of your website and make it a bit friendlier.

User Experience: If you didn’t own your website and you came across it how would you feel once you got there? User experience is everything when it comes to bounce rate. If it is a poor user experience than people are going to leave very quickly.

Launch A Blog: A blog will give people a reason to stick around your website a bit longer. It gives a user a reason to make another action on your website and stick around depending on how useful or interesting your blog posts are.

Change Your Content: Is your website content old and stale? Has it not been updated since your design? Chances are people are starting read it than tuning out and leaving the page. Try giving your content a bit of a revamp to get visitors to keep reading through your website.

Re-Brand: Often times when websites simply lack the ability to hold onto a reader’s attention than it might be time to go through a slight rebrand of your website. This means changing the messaging, logos and concept across the board.

It is important to test a variety of different things when you are trying to decrease the bounce rate of your website. Sometimes it is not pin pointed to just one effort but a variety of efforts and until you change them all you won’t see the effects you are looking for. If your website has been sitting untouched for many years it probably needs an entire overhaul but if it is new than it might be the product or service itself scaring visitors away. Of course, every website and business is entirely different in every way, but these are some suggestions that might help. Please feel free to share any other suggestions that have worked for your business to help decrease the bounce rate of your website.

Here is a basic video (a few years old but still good!) about how to use Google Webmaster Tools:

Links to Your Site: This is a great area to be familiar with because it will show you all the links that are pointing to your website along with all your internal website pages as well. It is nice to be able to look at who is connecting with you so you can estimate what direction you want to take your link building into. Your links should be evenly spread out throughout your entire link building campaign. You don’t want to be top heavy on any one effort.

Crawl Errors: Google webmaster tools will also show you in detail any crawl errors that are occurring on your website. This is important because you want to know if certain areas of your website are having a difficult time to be read by the search engine crawlers.

Keywords: It also shows you what keywords have a significant focus on your website. This will allow you to diversify or shift your focus in order to utilize a variety of different keywords throughout your website.

Sitemaps: Having a sitemap is just SEO 101. It will show you how many pages are being indexed currently by your existing sitemap. If your sitemap has any issues this is where you will see it.

Make the effort to install Google webmaster tools on your website. This also gives Google a heads up that you are open and willing to let them in so they can understand everything about your website. This is important from a ranking and trust factor standpoint. This tells the search engines that you have nothing to hide from them and you don’t mind them seeing how you build your links and market your website. If you have nothing to hide this will help you in the long run.

Let’s take a look at some of the most important areas to view in your Google analytics account:

1. Visitors: In this section of your Google analytics software you can see a variety of information specific to your visitor. You can see what types of browsers people use to find you along with things like connection speeds and what kind of mobile devices people use when they are on the go to find your business. Often times a website or functions of a website will appear different in other browsers. This will give you a better understanding what elements you need to work on with your website to make sure things are consistent across the board.

2. Traffic Sources: This section will be your best friend. This is where it shows you what keywords are driving traffic along with which referring sites are bringing over traffic. You are going to want to look at this information on a regular basis in order to see what is going on with your marketing. If a website posted a link about you and it is delivering traffic to your website you are going to want to know this type of information. Once you get going with your online marketing and SEO this section of the analytics software is going to be your best friend. It will show you what is actually working and what isn’t. If you spend a great deal of time in a certain area that almost never delivers any type of traffic than this information will be valuable so that you can make the proper changes so that traffic does find their way to your site.

3. Content: This section allows you to go through the pages of your website along with any blog posts you might have to drill down to specific page data. This will allow you to target various elements on those specific pages in order to maximize their overall efficiency. If you notice a certain page get a great deal of traffic but the bounce rate is quite high you can make the necessary changes to reduce that bounce rate.

Google analytics is very important and will be even more important when times moves on and your SEO becomes very robust and comprehensive. Learn it now while you are getting started. You will have an easier time to understand the data down the road.

Here is the video from Matt Cutts about Changing Your Hosting:

Always try moving your website to a quality hosting company. It might not directly reflect your rankings but you never want your company website to share a server with a handful of websites that might have slightly frowned upon services. If one of those website carries a virus onto the server the server could ultimately go down for some period of time.