You may have noticed that some blogs don’t begin with the usual “www” at the start, this one being an example.

If you try typing in http://www.blogtactics.com in to your browser you will end up back at the http://blogtactics.com version

Why have I done this?

Well Google considers the “www” version and no “www” version of your site as two seperate domains.

Over time, as you get more backlinks to your site, some of those links will point to the non “www” version, and some will point to the “www” version, so in Google’s eyes that pagerank “link juice” is split across two seperate domains, meaning you’re losing out…

Fortunately it’s pretty quick and easy to fix.

There’s two ways of doing it, first you can try simply adding the “no-www” plugin for wordpress. This attempts to update the relevant file (.htaccess) for you with the correct code, but it doesn’t always work, as sometimes your hosting won’t let the plugin have access to the .htaccess file, in which case you need to do it manually, which I’ve covered in the video below..

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The default permalink structure that yo get when you install WordPress is NOT very SEO (search engine) friendly and will not help your blog posts to rank well for your chosen keywords in the search engine results.

The “permalink” structure is basically the file structure that wordpress uses to record where you blog posts and pages are stored on your site.

the default option is usually like this:

http://homewebpage.net/?p=123

although you also have two other options:

http://homewebpage.net/2008/03/11/sample-post/

and

http://homewebpage.net/archives/123

Non of these are particularly search engine friendly, I won’t go in to all the reasons why, as this is not a post about SEO, but rather about how to optimise your blog for the best results.

The last option available on the “Options” -> “Permalinks” settings page in the Admin area of your blog is for a custom permalink structure that you can specify yourself.

The best format to use to make your posts search engine friendly is (imho) this:

/%postname%/

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