Usually in the course of making changes to your site, you will come across some pages whose URLs need to change - say, in accordance with an updated page title - or which need to be removed completely. Making your URLs more accurate is fine, but many people forget to follow through on updating all of their links - big mistake!

The first step after changing a URL is to update all of your other pages which link to your old URL. Most CMSs like Joomla and WordPress will update all of your links automatically. If you don't use a CMS, this will probably be a more manual process. One way is with search engines; for example, if I wanted to update the URL for this blog, I would Google "link:http://aquabluemarketing.com/marketing-20-blog" to find which links Google had in its indices. Note that this is not guaranteed to find 100% of your existing links, however.

Once you have updated all links on your own site, you should setup a friendly redirect for residual links from search engines and other sites. Some CMSs have automatic URL redirects built-in, and some have components to assist you in forwarding your URLs (for example, Joomla has ReDJ). If neither of these applies to you, you should add 301 redirects to your .htaccess file.

This may seem like a lot of work, but if you are interested in maintaining traffic to your existing pages, it is a valuable investment.  Follow these steps and you will avoid losing the SEO value of your page!