Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation
SEO
Wordpress MU how to redirect non-www to www
Nov 17th
You installed Wordpress MU on Apache and wrote few blog posts. Now when you go to your site by typing the www version of url (ex: www.yourblog.com) the url automatically get changed to non www version? But you want to get the www version instead?
Ok. This is what you have to do
1) Login to Wordpress Mu admin
2) On left side menu “Site Admin” -> “Blogs” and click on your blog
3) Change site url from http://yourblog.com to http://www.yourblog.com
4) Scroll down and press “Update options”
Now all non-www requests will be redirect to www version.
(The procedure is similar in regular Wordpress where you need to change the “Blog Address URL” in admin -> Settings -> General)
Of course to work this you need to have apache mod_rewrite installed and activated on your server.
Keeping only one url version is search engine friendly. Say you allow your site to be accessed by all these urls. www.yourblog.com, yourblog.com and yourblog.com/index.php. All these point to a same page. This can be lead to pagerank splits, Backlinks split and lastly you’re risking getting filtered for duplicate content by the new filters at Google.
For these reasons it is better you keep either www or non-www version activated but not both.
Determine the best way to automate Sitemaps
Nov 16th
In simple terms, a sitemap (or site map) is a list of all the pages in your website. Sitemaps provide two benefits: easier navigation (for visitors of your site) and better visibility by search engines.
With the rise of modern SEO techniques the importance of the sitemap has been growing. Sitemaps are the best way to inform search engines about changes on your website.
As a development company, we always apply current SEO techniques on our customer’s websites to ensure that they get top ranking on search engines. Not only on Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com etc. as well.
Including sitemaps is one of the important tasks we perform when developing sites for our clients. And this is done either manually or dynamically according to the customer needs.
Typically a good site with lots of content changes regularly. In this case it is expensive and tedious to continually update the site map. For this reason, we feel that in some cases it is important to be able to auto generate a sitemap.
We evaluated some sitemap auto generating tools and following are some of the solutions we like:
- Google XML Sitemaps [ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ]
- It is a plugin for Wordpress sites, which automatically updates the sitemap and notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post/content.
- Addme.com [ http://www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm ].
- An online tool dedicated for sites developed using Ruby on Rails (ROR)
- Google Site Map Generator [ http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/ ]
- Another simple online tool to generate site maps.
- PHPClasses.org [ http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2612.html ]
- A class library which can be integrated with PHP sites.
It is obvious that selecting a sitemap generating mechanism is depending on several facts such as the nature of the site, sever side technology used etc. So making the correct decision is up to your experience in SEO and web development team.
Contact us if you would like help generating a sitemap for your site, have general web marketing, seo, or web design questions…