Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

Most of those starting out in SEO may not fully understand or be aware of a website redirect. An experienced SEO or web developer may spit out the terms, “301″, “302″ or “404″ redirect. I’m not exactly sure where the numbers came from but these three techniques have different functions. First let me explain the redirects-how they work-and why they are so darn important in SEO.

The 301 Redirect

This is the most common and widely used. When content is moved to a different page or removed altogether, we need to preserve rankings. You may have a pages such as a press release or services that rank high for “blue widgets” in Google. Later, you may do some archive cleanup, a site redesign, or totally re-code the site. The 301 would be put in place to send it “permanently” to a new page. For instance, if your old page is www.yoursite.com/blue-widgets/index.asp and after your change, you want it to go to www.yoursite.com/blue-widgets.html. A 301 tells the engines, “hey, we still have the content, it’s here now.” It’s almost like a change of address through the post office.

So how do you do a 301 redirect?

It does take a bit of programming and IT knowledge because there is code needed to be added and IT experience through IIS for Windows servers or .htaccess through an Apache server. Lisa Barone, a well-known SEO over at Bruce Clay created a very good 301 tutorial for the beginner.

The 302 Redirect

This is a more “temporary” change because for many reasons you may want to go back to the original page. For example, say I am an e-commerce site and offer sales for the Christmas season. I may do a 302 from www.mysite.com/blue-widgets.asp to www.mysite.com/christmas-specials.asp. I want to preserve the ranking for the blue-widgets.asp page after the Christmas season and change it back to its original location. Again, this technique, is in-depth and some technical background is required. One of the authorities on SEO, Matt Cutts has a great article on the explanation and how to install this technique. You can see the 302 redirect explation and learn why and when to use this type of SEO tactic.

The 404 Redirect

This redirect is for pages that do not exist altogether and tell the search engines, “It isn’t here but we have other content that may be similar”. It also tells the user, “that page doesn’t exist but stay on our site and we may have something else you may be interested in”. In recent years, many sites have created custom 404 pages that can have the same look and feel as the rest of the site. If not, there is a generic Microsoft 404 page that comes up in IE.

The best way to use the 404 and keep your visitors on your site is to link to your sitemap or search area. From here, there is a good chance they can find what they are looking for or something similar. And the best message to put is something like “Sorry, this page must have been removed or placed in a different location, Click here(sitemap) to find what you are looking for”. What also works well is placing a call-to-action as well. Include a phone number or email address. This is a good way to show you’re interested in helping them find what they want and in-turn you close a sale!

A major factor Google uses in determining PageRank is inbound linking but what about internal linking? Internal linking is basically links from one page to the other in your site, primarily used for easy navigation and effective web usability.

While this practice can dramatically improve page views and conversions, does Google look at a site and say “hey, this site can also improve the user experience by effectively helping an end user find everything they are looking for?” If so, the algorithms can look at the anchor text and page names to determine if they are relevant and also base what number or “density” of internal links are present on a page.

One way to institute internal linking is to simply use the famous, “To learn more click here…” Many site use this but primarily to save on space and give a brief overview or “teaser” on their homepage which is where a great deal of natural searchers land.

I haven’t seen anything relating to internal link density and Google using it as a factor but I wouldn’t be surprised if they do and use it as a minor influence. I’m not condoning putting links here , there , and everywhere because that can get real annoying when trying to get through one of your articles or product descriptions.

I recommend using them sparingly and whenever appropriate.