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Thanks for the advice - it really helped! I guess I should reframe the question now that I have a better understanding of what goals I actually should be pursuing.

I do have a more specific question: There are a few older links that show up as results on the front page when I google the company name. Our site was recently redesigned and there are newer sites with updated, but similar content. If I place a 301 redirect on the older pages, will the newer site take the place of the old address in the SERP? Will I have to edit the older pages in the sitemap? Will I have to throw a rel=canonical on the newer page?

Thanks again for all the help, guys!

I have some re-write rules for Wordpress, which are contained within <ifmodule>tags. And below those I have some redirect 301s. I placed the code after the Wordpress re-writes, and then tried to place them at the end, past the 301 redirects, and still I receive a 404 on the index.html.</ifmodule>

Is there anything else I could be doing? Should I create a new index.html and place a redirect within there?

I pasted the code into my .htaccess, and still receive a 404 for index.html. Must it be placed within module tags? Does the position of placement matter? Thanks for the quick reply, btw.

The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts.

How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess?

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

My most recent crawl returned a number of 'missing meta description' errors, and when I checked individual URLs, it turned out they were Wordpress Archived pages - for individual months and days (e.g. http:// .../2011/01).

What's the best way to go about adding descriptions to these pages, if at all? Or should I have these pages not be indexed?

I am using the All in One SEO plugin, so maybe there is an easy fix through this plugin, or it may be the cause of these errors?

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

**EDIT

After looking it up further, I have decided to use noindex for Archives, which should solve my problem right? Or is there a benefit to having those archived pages?

Thanks! I threw a redirect from the http:// to the http://www. address.

I have backlinks coming into my homepage, which has both a www. URL and one that's merely http://mysite.com. Which is the preferred URL for best optimization for search engines and how do I find this out?