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If you’re running a website, chances are you may know about the WWW or No WWW controversy.

Some say that routing your URL to be accessible by WWW is the best way to go – some say the WWW is implied. Do you regularly type in the WWW when you access a website?

If you think it’s implied and possibly a little redundant, you’re not alone. There’s an entire movement of people out there who want to completely do away with the WWW, and are setting up their servers to do a redirect to their domain name without the WWW. They’re hoping this will dissuade WWW users from bothering to type in the prefix.

What About SEO?

There are differing standpoints on whether or not including the WWW prefix disrupts your SEO. Some say that Google will bump you up if your site can be accessed using both WWW, and without the prefix. Some want to do away with WWW entirely. Some only want to use WWW.

Whatever your flavor, the best way to figure out which is going to work for your site is testing. If your site has a ton of visitors and great SEO indexing, it’s probably best to leave the site alone.

There’s tons of info out there about how to do a 301 redirect using your .htaccess file. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll unfortunately find it a little difficult to get your blog not to redirect for either WWW or non-WWW. Meaning, that if you want your users to get to your site using both www.example.com and example.com without a redirect, you’re going to have to get into your code.

functions.php

Your theme functions file should be accessible under Appearance/Editor. When you log into your dashboard, find that file. It’s called functions.php, but in the Default Theme for example, it’s called “Theme Functions”.

Once you find the file, insert this line of code under the header information in the file:

remove_filter('template_redirect','redirect_canonical');

It should only take up one line, and not be attached to any other lines of code.

This code should allow any visitor to your site to access your wordpress site using both the WWW prefix, and without the prefix.

What if I want either one, but not both?

Forget getting into that .htaccess file – there’s an easier way.

Under your blog’s general settings, WordPress asks what you want the address of your blog to be:

Rather than dealing with hacking into code, simply type in either the www prefix before your domain name, or leave the WWW off. Whatever you put in is what WordPress will use to index you. It’s as simple as that!

WordPress makes life on the web so much easier in so many ways. It’s a great, customizable CMS, and when it comes to optimizing your SEO in whatever way possible, WordPress has that kind of flexibility. Just figure out what your preferred prefix option is, and use the handy tips above to customize your installation. Remember to check your SEO rankings regularly!

We’ve talked a little about PPC on this blog before. No, PPC is not SEO, but it’s also an incredibly important part of your search marketing strategy, and it affects your SEO.

How? Well, the traffic you’re getting on your blog from a good PPC campaign, along with the way users view your site, affects your visibility. Bounce rate is something Google may keep in mind when calculating SEO, so if you’re running a PPC campaign, you should be carefully watching your Analytics.

Here’s some more interesting food for thought – Google loves spending your money. PPC is a significant source of income for Google, so they’re going to squeeze you for what they can reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably get).

This week, in the middle of working on a client campaign, I saw something important I’d forgotten about over the past few months.

If you don’t know what Google Auto Matching is, it’s one of those important things about doing search marketing on Google that you need to burn into your memory.

Auto Matching is a Google PPC feature that allows Google to find “other relevant keywords” that you may not necessarily specify in your initial keyword lists, and to match those searches with your ads.

Doesn’t that sound appealing? Well, it shouldn’t. You don’t really have any control over what Google decides should be relevant traffic. This means that Google could be earning you tons of idiot clicks at your expense – and that’s going to lead directly to blowing right through your budget.

How do you know what terms Google is matching you on? You don’t, really. You can do some sample searches with your keywords to see what comes up, but other than that, the whole matter just takes a little control out of your hands.

Here’s how you get rid of Auto Matching:

In your Google PPC Client Center, access each campaign individually, and click on the “Settings” tab.

You will see, at the very bottom, an option panel for automatic matching. It should look something like this:

If you don’t see Auto Matching, then your account isn’t eligible for it, so you don’t have to worry.

If you do see Automatic Matching as an option, and it says you’re opted in, click “Edit” and simply turn it off.

Make sure to watch your traffic and expense before and after you disable Automatic Matching. In very few cases, we’ve seen Auto Matching turn even more of a profit for advertisers, but we’re talking 1% of 100% of customers.

Google is going to take the opportunity of the auto matching function being on to spend, spend, spend. If you’re an affiliate, this could be especially crushing. Affiliates often use a broad spectrum of keywords in content campaigns to attract traffic, so you could end up spending a ton of money and getting plenty of irrelevant clicks.

You should be doing whatever possible to get control of all your advertising campaigns, regardless of whether or not you’re running PPC, SEO, or Email.

When considering the design of your website or blog functionality, usability and aesthetics are always important considerations; but how your website’s design affects your SEO strategy may not always be considered or even apparent. So how can you tell if your website’s or blog’s design is having an effect on your search engine results, and what should you consider to make your design as SEO-friendly as possible?

Size Matters

Search engine ranking is based on content, so the more you have the better chance your site has of getting top results. A good way to see if adding content would help your ranking is to look at the amount of content your biggest competitors have in comparison to you. A great and easy way to add content is to start a blog or create free resource pages. This can boost your results with little effort, especially if you hire a writer to handle the blog content.

Look at your Graphics

Graphics are a great way to make your website or blog interesting and professional looking, but without adding the appropriate keyword tags to the html code then they will add nothing to your SEO strategy. If you also have little content on your page they may even hinder it.

Are your technical elements ok?

Elements to dynamic websites such as PHP databases can virtually eliminate the amount of content that you have on your site by not having a static URL. While in most cases this cannot be helped, creating a site map can assist you in getting your content seen by search engine web crawlers. Also, take a look at your html code. Messy code can have a negative effect on the methods you may be using to get top search engine results.

Is your Domain Name working for you?

Choosing a good domain name is a very important part of maximizing your SEO strategy and is also usually an important part of your website’s identity. While choosing a domain name that is easy to remember and spell, and represents the purpose of your business or blog is important, considering its effectiveness within the realm of search engine optimization is also critical. Consider purchasing multiple domain names from your web host to take full advantage of the effect this can have on your SEO results.

Finding a balance between the design of your website or blog for the purpose of both appealing to your clients or users and getting them there in the first place is always important, and using these tips can get you the results you want.

Keeping track of all the tips and tricks that make up the ever changing world of search engine optimization can be a time consuming task, especially if it not part of your everyday job, and is just a tool you use to market your online business. So is it worth it to use one of the many online companies or consultant to maximize your SEO strategy and can it give the results that make it worth the investment? Here are some things to consider before hiring an SEO expert and to determining whether this method of marketing your website or blog is right for you.

How are you doing on your own?

Before looking to spending money on the services of an SEO consultant, it is first important to determine whether you are doing well enough on your own, and whether or not you have utilized all the easy and free tools available to you. Start by doing a search on a variety of search engines using keywords that people may use to find your website, business or blog and see where you come up in the results. If you are making the first page of results you may want to determine how much better a SEO company could do before making the investment. Also, if you are not using free online tools such as Google Analytics then you may want to exhaust these methods first.

Hiring a Professional

If you have done all you can or don’t have time to maximize your SEO strategy and are still coming up short on the most popular search engines, then hiring a professional SEO consultant may be in your best interest. If this is the route you decide to take making sure you hire the services of a company or individual consultant that knows how search engine optimization works and uses SEO strategies that won’t get your website banned from search engines is important. Google, for example is making active efforts to monitor and remove websites that use aggressive “black hat” SEO strategies, and the cost associated with getting yourself back online if this happens can be considerable. Always ask for references and examples of their work, and ask them about the types of strategies they use. In general stay away from companies that use purchased links, as these are the worst offenders to getting your site removed from search results.

In some cases, paying for the services of a professional SEO company or consultant can be worth the money spent, but like hiring any professional making sure you are getting quality service at a reasonable price is always important and is good business sense.

Finding it hard to keep up with your SEO strategy, and not convinced that all the tricks and tips you are using are getting you the results you want? Then may be is time to re-evaluate your strategy and make sure that you have covered all the easiest bases before launching into complicated programming ideas or costly SEO software packages. One of the easiest ways to get the most valuable commodity in the SEO world, backlinks, is to use forums; but using this method effectively is not always the most obvious. Before abandoning this technique here are a few tips to get the most of this fairly simple strategy.

• Know your niche and Google the most popular keywords for that niche – Whether you write about knitting or the latest security software, knowing where your potential customers or readers are asking questions will make your time spent on these forums more valuable.
• Identify the top five forums for your niche and join them – For this method to be effective, you have to join at least five forums. Most of your potential readers will be on at least one of these forums, and you’ll want to make sure you are getting to most of them.
• Post Replies – This may seem obvious, but the more you do this the more success you’ll have. Also making sure that your replies are useful to the user and informative to others will make people more likely to want to check out your blog or website.
• Create a keyword optimized signature – This is what will get you the backlinks, and is what will get you the results you want in search engines.

In addition to using this technique in forums to get backlinks, participating in forums can also get your website to rank higher on popular search engines by establishing your reputation as an expert. Posting interesting information that would be of genuine interest to other forum users, or providing accurate and helpful responses to questions can make others recognize you as a valuable source of information. Of course you must still always remember to include links to your website and blog in your signature or else this won’t work.

Overall, forums can be a great way to both optimize your SEO strategy and keep you finger on the pulse of your niche market. Remembering the general rules for creating content on the internet by keeping the quality up, and remembering to use every opportunity to include SEO tags to get the backlinks you want will get you a high ranking website or blog with minimal effort.

Monitor your visitors and increase your profits!

Last week, we discussed some methods for equipping your blog with analytics services that will tell you more about your visitors’ behavior. Today, I’d like t present you with some specific scenarios regarding how a program like Google Analytics could work for you. If you’re not using Analytics, you’ll see that you’re missing out on some seriously helpful information, and hopefully you’ll jump on the bandwagon!

Bounce Rates

You can use Analytics to determine what percentage of visitors come to your site, and leave without moving on to your intended action. Whether that’s clicking through to another webpage on your site, or signing up for an offer, you can bet pages with high bounce rates need to be modified.

If your click-to-conversion page has a high bounce rate, ask yourself questions like these – Is your offer large enough for people to notice? Do you give your visitors a proper value proposition to get them interested? If they should be able to contact you with questions, is your contact info clear, or is there an FAQ?

If visitors are bouncing on pages like a sitemap, it’s possible that you need to organize your information better. With more and more pages becoming optimized for Web 2.0, you’ll need to arm yourself with the best pages possible to compete.

Visitor Time

There are reports available in Analytics that will let you know how long visitors are spending on your site based on what keyword brought them there. This is as useful as a Google Adwords Search Query report in that you can use this information to help build out your negative keyword list in Adwords. If you find a visitor coming to your site with a keyword that isn’t relative to your content, it’s a good idea to consider making that a negative keyword in your Adwords campaigns.

You can also see if the average visitor over time bounces from your site when brought there with a certain keyword. If you see a repetitive pattern happening where users spend under a minute on your site by using a general keyword, you may want to consider changing match types in Adwords, or eliminating that keyword from your marketing arsenal.

Another useful way to use visitor time is to look at content placements. If you find that, over time, a certain site brings in traffic that either won’t convert or bounces quickly, you can exclude that placement from within your Google Adwords account. It’s easy!

Geography

Many people don’t consider how useful geographic information can be. Take a look at what countries, states, or general area your visitors are coming from depending on your market. If you find that a majority of your visitors are coming from one country, why not build a campaign or landing pages that specifically cater to that country or area?

You may also want to construct your campaigns built on your power country’s peak time zones, to get more converting traffic out of that country.

With so many useful tools available in Analytics, there’s no reason not to take advantage of all the reliable, and FREE information out there for your blog.