Last night I was talking to a the operator of TalkXHTML.com who is working on some S.E.O. projects right now, and I asked him “what could I do better for my blog?”

He told me that a quick tip that might help me is to stop allowing people to use domain.com, instead of www.domain.com.

I had heard about this before. Basically, some search engines would look at domain.com and www.domain.com as two different sites with the same content, thus rating the content based on that information, I might not rank as high as I should in search engines.

I just figured that my site was doing okay, so what do I care? But he told me there is a simple fix that once added to my .htaccess file, it would return a HTTP Status Code - 301 Moved Permanently, and redirect just fine to www.phoenixrealm.com instead of phoenixrealm.com. I love simple fixes, so I asked him for the code that I would need to add to my .htaccess file, and you know what? It is only two lines.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I opened up my .htaccess file, and the line right after RewriteEngine On, I put those in, and now when someone types in domain.com, it will redirect them to www.domain.com automatically. Same with all perminant links to stories that do not have the www. prefix.

After testing it out and noting that it worked, I am now in the waiting phase. I am unsure of how Google and other search engines will react to the change, but let’s hope it is all for the good. With a page rank update coming soon, I am sure everyone could use all the Search Engine tips they can to make it through the update with their site as high positioning as possible, so good luck to all of those that attempt to optimize, and let’s hope our work is positively noticed.

I don’t totally understand how often WordPress will play with the .htaccess file, though if it does, I will always have this post as a log of the information I need to set it back to its correct, more S.E.O. efficient way.

If anyone has any other SEO tips that they have tried and proved working, please let me know. Also, if you have used the above tip before, and it has caused more harm than good, let me know.

Thanks again to Corey from TalkXHTML.com for spending the time to look at my site, and hopefully this will only be part one of many tips as I continue to work on improving this site.

Update/Note: Don’t forget to make sure to CHMOD the settings of .htaccess to something that WordPress can’t write to, or else from time to time it will write over your changes.