301 redirect question

a 301 redirect is what you use AFTER you've changed the address of your post.

So lets say that you did have a post at www.mydomain.com/page_1 and you';ve managed to build a few links to that page. The search engines are returning that page. Everything is good except you suspect that things could be better with a more descriptive URL.

So what do you do. You rename the page to www.mydomain.com/importance-of-reading

That's great there because when the search engines indexes the site you get a little bit of extra weight for the terms included in the address but what about the links already pointing to the old address www.mydomain.com/page_1 suddenly they're broken links how do you fix that?

This is where a 301 redirect comes in. You put a 301 redirect on www.mydomain.com/page_1 that points to the new page at www.mydomain.com/importance-of-reading

This tells any browser that follows a link to www.mydomain.com/page_1 that the contact has moved permanently to www.mydomain.com/importance-of-reading. The browser will immediately go on to the new page.

Perhaps of greater importance is what happens when the search engine spider follows the same link. The search engine recognises that the page has moved and updates its database accordingly. Everything that it used to return as www.mydomain.com/page_1 is now updates to go to www.mydomain.com/importance-of-reading and ranks accordingly for the new terms in the address.