I just realized I’ve forgotten to mention two small tips for helping your site rank better in the search engines.
The first is a very common one, and over time could help a little bit. This is to have all of your “yoursite.com” traffic redirect to “www.yoursite.com”. This will help focus the pagerank and ratings onto one page instead of two separate (but identical) pages. Making this happen for you entire site is a very simple process. As I mentioned in a different topic, you’ll need to make a small modification to your .htaccess file.
If you don’t know what that file is, look in the root directory of your website (usually “public_html” or something like that). Assuming you’re on a Linux server (if you don’t know, then you probably are), there should be a file in there named “.htaccess”. If there’s not, simply create a blank file and give it that name. The body of the file needs three simple lines:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If there is already some text in your .htaccess file, just put those last two lines at the bottom of the file (it should already have “RewriteEngine On” at the top.
That’s it! Try it out. Type in yoursite.com and it should instantly redirect to www.yoursite.com. This will work for all sub-pages as well. If you type in yoursite.com/youthministry, it will automatically redirect to www.yoursite.com/youthministry.
The second tip is much easier, but less likely to help. Extend your domain registration by at least 4 or 5 years. I always recommend you extend it WAY out (10 years or more), simply so you make sure you don’t lose the name. However, there are thoughts that having a longer period will help you rank slightly better. The reason? Spammers pick up names for a year at a time, so a site that has already extended for a large number of years will seem more legitimate. Again, this will make just a tiny difference (if any), but it’s good to do for other reasons anyhow so you might as well do it.
Google and Yahoo both say that there are “hundreds” of things that help determine how a site ranks for a particular phrase, so this is likely one tiny piece of that puzzle.
Mickey
Leave a Reply