How a simple & easy 301 redirect can maximise your SEO

In order to maximise your search engine optimisation you have to make sure that the search engines are treating the www and non www versions of your website in the same way. For example yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com would be treated as two different sites by the search engines unless you tell them that they are the same. The implication of this is that you may not get all the credit for your inbound links as they may be split across the www and non www versions of your website.

If you add the following code into your websites .htaccess file it will tell the search engines that you want to treat the www and non www versions of your website as the same site. All you will need to do is change the link to the your site as necessary and then you will have set up what is known as a 301 redirect, thus maximising your search engine optimisation.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.yoursite.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

The .htaccess file can be found in the root folder of your website. Please note that this file may be hidden so you may need to set ‘show hidden files’ within your FTP client in order for it to be visible.