Quick SEO Tips-Choosing A Preferred Domain

Here is one of those very handy SEO tips to use that will give you a better search ranking with the the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Technorati and its known as choosing a preferred domain.

Whats This Then

Quite simply most websites can be reached from two domain names such as the case with my blog address which can reached with or without the www in place. For example you could reach it by typing in the browser http://www.nick-squires.com or you can leave out the www and type  http://nick-squires.com  Both work fine but in terms of of search ranking its not a good thing.

Why Not

You see Google and the others will view the two addresses as 2 different sites. Although they both go to the same page they are viewed as separate and this means your page rank will be diluted. Lets say you have a hundred visits to your site and 60 use the the www option and 40 choose not to. Instead of Google seeing you had 100 visits to that site it looked like it was one site that got 60 and the another got 40.

Its the same with sites linking in to you yours, if there not all using the same address then your search engine ranking will be not as good as it could be.

Ways To Fix This

One way to fix this is as simple as it gets and that is to make a conscious effort to stick with one of the 2 addresses. Whatever you decide to go with is the one you will always use when passing it out such as emails or advertising or wherever you happen to use this domain name. That way people should use it the way you want especially if you hyper-link it.

The second way is very straight forward as well. Go to your Google Webmaster Tools Account and specify there which of the two domain name options you want Google to only use, your preferred domain and set your account to that. This way Google will only use that domain name in the search results thus giving you a higher ranking over time.

Thats all for now, I hope you enjoyed another one of my quick SEO tips-choosing a preferred domain.

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