Search Engine Optimisation - 301 Redirect

The 301 redirect is a wonderful thing. It's a search engine friendly way of redirecting the visitor from an old non existant page to your page of choice.

For example: A website has all it's file formatting in .html, i.e. index.html and they want to make their site more controlable, so they decide to use PHP. This is a tricky move when it comes to search engine optimisation as the file extensions are going to change resulting in the pages that are already indexed to be superseeded by the new .php versions.

Implementing a 301 redirect is fairly simple, depending on how you're going to be doing it and what type of server you're running.

There are many rules that you can put in place to forward specific pages to new specific pages.
Here is a basic 301 Redirect using the .htaccess file:
redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/
Once put in the root of the site it will forward everything to http://www.example.com/

Using a 301 redirect it passes all the pr from the old page to the new redirected to page. This means that all that hard work creating pr is not lost and hopefully you will maintain your position in SERPS.

Thats it for basic 301 redirect. In the future I will go more indepth with the rules etc.