Learn/Don't-Lose-People-Who-Don't-Type-WWW
Revision as of 23:44, 18 August 2010 by Aliza Earnshaw (talk | contribs)
By [[User:{{{Writer}}}|Kristina Weis]] on August 19, 2010
Kristina Weis is a community manager for AboutUs.org. Kristina spends lots of time talking with website owners who are trying to promote their sites and businesses online. To learn more about Kristina and her work, see her personal page at AboutUs.org.
Though websites live at web addresses that start with www -- like http://www.Example.com -- it's increasingly common for people to type just Example.com into the navigation bar of a web browser.
Most professional webmasters make sure that typing either "www.Example.com" and "Example.com" into the navigation bar will get someone to the right website. Too often, however, people don't think about this issue, and someone who types just "Example.com" won't get to the website at all. Worse yet, that person may assume that the website and business no longer exist.
Wait, it gets even worse. Any links to your website that don't include "www." -- and we all want valuable inbound links, don't we? -- won't work either, and won't take people to your site when they click them.
Point People to Your Website
http://Example.com takes people to your website too:
The best method is to make the non-www version of your website redirect visitors (and search engine crawlers) to the www version via a 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect. A 301 redirect is recommended because it means that your website's content only lives in one place and things that can help your search engine optimization (SEO) like PageRank will be passed to your main website.
Just putting your content on both URLs isn't ideal because of the canonicalization issue it poses for SEO.
For technical guidance on creating a 301 redirect, see this article at TutorialsRoom.com.
Read more about growing your business on the web.