301 and the base URL

[nickwoodward]

Hi, please bear with me as I'm pretty new to all this!

I've my base URL but obviously want to add keywords to it for seo purposes. Should I redirect from the base URL to the URL with the keywords appended? So my landing page goes from say www.moz.com to www.moz.com/keywords-here.

If I do that, should I replicate all the meta data (descriptions etc) on the original landing page? Or does it not matter?

Thanks,

Nick

[nickwoodward]

Thanks Kevin, I'll definitely have a look at those guides.

Yeah, it's the exact same page - the main gateway to the site. It's just that once we started looking at the SEO side of things we realised that we should have keywords in the URL on that page too, and having had the site crawled I realised the original doesn't have all the meta data the redirect does. For example right now the original has no keywords, where as the redirect does.

[KevinBudzynski]

If you are moving to another domain, the key is to do 301 redirects to the page that closely resembles the original. If none exists, you should 404. The page title should be the same or close to the same as the original (as long as you use best practices --see guides  on Moz). Same goes for the meta description (although not directly a ranking factor). The url is extremely important and should be focus on what is on the page (Moz URL guide).