Pastrommy [dot] Com

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

I came across a pretty cool Firefox addon a couple weeks ago called Flagfox. The addon displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information.

Why is this important to webmasters? Well, it’s not that big of a deal really. There is some debate amongst search engine experts as to whether server location effects search results. It is, however, a known fact that domain extensions affect search engine results, especially for Google. For example, the domain pastrommy.us will be higher in the search engine rankings for users submitting the query from inside the United States. The same goes for .ca, .uk, and so on.

Either way, it’s up to you whether you want to run the risk of lower SERP’s because of your web hosting location. I’ve found a very reliable host located in Canada that I’ve decided to stick with despite the possible altercations.

Today I discovered something mildly hilarious. My school runs some educational software called Desire2Learn on a web server in order to manage classes. It’s basically a way for students to connect with their teachers over the internet. The funny part is that the server is hosted in Canada. You would think a state school with government grants and the like would be putting the money back into the United States economy. What ever happened to logical thinking?

One important part of search engine optimization is making sure your URL’s aren’t competing with one another. The URL “pastrommy.com” is different than “www.pastrommy.com” according to search engines. Since search engines are the most important traffic source, you better submit to their standards.

It doesn’t matter so much whether you choose to attach the “www.” or not but it is very important that you pick one or the other. Not choosing whether to append the “www.” or not means that your web pages will be spidered with and without the prefix. What does this mean to you? It means you’ll be competing with yourself! It’s hard enough to rank on competitive keywords so why make it harder.

So how do you fix it? Wordpress couldn’t make it easier. In fact, if you wanted to, you could totally forget you ever read this post and you would be perfectly fine. Wordpress automatically changes your URLs according to your settings.

For example, if your settings look like this:

Then when someone types “computermemoryinfo.com” into their browser, they are automatically redirected to “www.computermemoryinfo.com”. It is very important that everyone sees the same URL.

What if I’m not running Wordpress? If you’re not running Wordpress, you’ll need to make a file named .htaccess in the root directory and insert the following code.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURDOMAINNAME\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Voila! You now have a single URL that all visitors see!