There will always be times when webmasters need to change a website’s urls, temporarily point one page to another or take down a page (permanently or for routine maintenance). When encountered with these types of situations, many webmasters are unsure of how to handle the task at hand. As these issues are fairly common, we have compiled a bit of information about common HTTP status codes and their uses for you to refer to as needed.

200 OK
We’ll start with the basics. This HTTP status code indicates that the request was successful. You want this for all of your site’s pages (the ones that you want indexed).

301 Moved Permanently
If at any time a URL of a page changes (maybe from a site redesign or a new page has been created to replace an old one), it is recommended to use a 301 Moved Permanently redirect. This code tells search engines that the page should be permanently redirected to the new page. This also helps to make sure users are sent to the correct page.

302 Found
This code should only be used for temporary redirects. The word ‘temporary’ is key. There are very few instances where this type of redirect should be used, but unfortunately it is the easiest to implement, so when trying to implement permanent redirects, we often see that a 302 Found was implemented instead.  With this HTTP status code, Google will continue to crawl and index the original URL.

404 Not Found
A 404 Not Found status code means that the page does not exist. It could have existed in the past, but does not presently.  In most instances, websites will issue the generic 404 page when the requested page cannot be found. However, these pages do not have your site’s navigation and can’t help the user find the information they were originally looking for; this why it is always recommended to create a custom 404 page. 

503 Service Unavailable
Many of you have tired to go to a website and it is down; perhaps due to maintenance tasks taking place. The best thing to do in this situation is to return a 503 HTTP status code. This tells search engines that the site is only down temporarily. Similar to 404 pages, you should also create a custom message explaining when the site might be available again.

Those familiar with the search engine landscape have probably noticed that in most cases only one or two lines per website will display in the search engine results pages of Google.  Well, the days of having only one or two listing per website has come to an end… for specific keyword phrases at least.

Google recently announced on their Webmaster Central blog that they will now be showing more results per domain.  Google has always stated that their goal is to provide relevant results as quickly as possible to a searcher.  With this recent update, they hope that users will now be able to find what they are looking for faster than before.

A handful of listings for one domain will appear for a single search query when the user searches for a keyword or phrase that indicates that they have a strong interest in a particular domain. For example, if you conduct a search for “Search Engine Land”, you will likely see a results page similar to the one below.  (Notice how many listings lead you to the Search Engine Land website.)

This change has some pros and cons for marketers.  If you want to capture traffic from a competitor and someone specifies in a search your competitor’s name, it could possibly be harder than before to capture visits to your website via organic search from these types of search queries.  This could be good, on the other hand, when users are searching for keywords that are specific to your website.  In this case, you have even greater potential to capture this traffic, as your domain will be able to practically own the first page of listings! 

We’ll be keeping an eye on how this impacts clients and we encourage you to do the same for you own website!

Meta data is a critical component of SEO. Meta data consists of primarily the title tag, the description tag and the keyowrd tag of a page.  This information, when properly used for SEO, can help to tell the search engine spiders and the searcher a bit more about what they will find on the page.

Let’s start by breaking down a listing in a search engine results page.

The clickable, blue link in Google’s search engine results pages is the title tag.  This is usually the actual title tag of your page, which is also visible when viewing the page (shown in the top of your browser).  As you can imagine, since this is the clickable link, it’s important to make sure that it includes keywords.  This can help with rankings and it can also encourage someone to click through to the page of your site listed.

The snippet of text just below the title is displayed to show a bit more information about the page to the searcher. This text can be pulled from a few places.  If Google’s spiders are not able to crawl the page or if they are not finding text that they think will be valuable to the searcher, they may rely on the Open Directory Project for this information.  Other times they may use the description tag that you assign to the page.  Lastly, Google may pull this text from a place within the page’s content.  For instance, if the specific search query is most related to a piece of the content located at the bottom of the page, Google may display content from the bottom of the page as the search snippet.

One bit of confusion is that Google will not always display the description tag that you have assigned to the page.  As mentioned earlier, if a piece of content on the page is more relevant to the search query, the search engine may choose to display that instead of your description tag.  This does not mean you should ignore the description tag by any means.  It can still add weight to your page. As Google is trying to create the best experience for the searcher, there are some elements such as the descriptive snippet, that they will tweak in order to create what they believe makes best search experience.  The next question that usually arises is: can I tell Google to only use my description tag?  Since it’s an algorithm that determines this, you can’t. However, if the text pulled is from the Open Directory Project, you can use the META NODP tag, which essentially lets you opt out of the Open Directory Project title and description.

Other elements of a snippet that are within the search engine results page are the URL and sometimes site links. The URL is pretty self explanatory – it is the destination URL of the page listed in the search engine results page. The site links are additional non-paid links into a few other pages on your site that Google feels is relevant for searchers.

Review your website’s meta data and be sure that the content on your page and meta data are in sync.  Even conduct searches for your keywords and see what displays in the search results. This can help you to find out what Google is telling searchers about your pages.