If you run an online business, chances are you rely on favorable search engine page rankings to attract new customers to your website. You’ve researched and selected keywords, developed rich, relevant content and you’ve attracted inbound links from other reputable websites in your industry with smart social networking and an on-site blog. You’ve even audited your site’s code structure to maximize the impact of keywords. In other words, you’ve developed a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign and you’re enjoying quality search engine traffic - likely customers who are ready to buy and looking for exactly the products you offer.

With more and more business originating from search engines, high-ranking pages on your website have become valuable assets. But what happens when you need to remove a high-ranking page, product or category from your site? How can you preserve search engine traffic that would otherwise be lost?

The solution is what’s known as a redirect. There are various forms of website redirects, but they all have the same purpose - seamlessly forwarding visitors from an out-of-date link to the new version of the same page. If the page no longer exists at all, a redirect should deliver visitors to the most relevant alternative page.

As in the case of a deleted page, redirects are often used to forward traffic within a website, but the same idea applies to higher level changes like transitions from one domain name to another. For example, if you’ve decided to rebrand your online business and you want to use a more appropriate domain name, redirect tools will automatically send visitors to the right pages on your new website. Search engines will eventually update results to send traffic directly to the new page.

Over time changes to your online business are inevitable, but used properly redirects will minimize the negative impact on the search engine page rankings you’ve worked so hard to develop. If your online business includes an AspDotNetStorefront shopping cart, Compunix offers two add-on products that make redirects easy.

Redirecting A Domain Or Shopping Cart System
The 301 URL Redirect add-on forwards traffic from each page of your old ecommerce site or shopping cart platform to the right page on your new site or system. Create an unlimited number of redirects for all file types including asp, php, jsp, html, htm and aspx. The system even safeguards against missing destination pages by sending visitors to a default page on the new site.

Redirecting A Deleted Page Or Product
Our Existing Page URL Redirect add-on forwards site traffic from deleted or unpublished pages in your shopping cart to a new or alternative page, preserving search engine rankings and saving site traffic. This add-on works with any page in your shopping cart - simply select an alternative destination and visitors are instantly redirected to the new page.

Looking for more easy-to-use SEO tools? Explore our full line of search engine optimization add-ons for your AspDotNetStorefront shopping cart.

Learn more about SEO in Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Optimization and Coding For SEO - Search Engine Visibility From The Inside Out.