SEO: Where's Your Home Page?

Okay, one quick thing for today that a lot of sites have gotten wrong. Start by answering this simple question: What's the URL for your home page?

Your answer is probably something like http://www.example.com/

Okay, now go look at your website. I'm sure you have lots of links to your home page from all over the site. There should be one on every page, right? Now, answer the next question - is the URL those links point to the same as your answer above?

Or are you linking to something like:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/index.asp
• http://www.example.com/index.cfm

If you are using one of the above instead of linking to the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/), you need to fix that. I can hear people out there shouting "but it's the same thing!" No, it's not the same thing... it's the same content, that you are showing at more than one URL. It's duplicate content, to the search engines, and you are the one who is linking to it so they can find it.

Pick one URL for your home page, and link to it consistently throughout your website. If you need a programmer to modify your shopping cart or content management system, maybe that's just what you have to do.

If that sounds like a major ordeal, you have another option, which is to set up a permanent redirect from http://www.example.com/ or whatever to http://www.example.com/ - on an Apache server, this can be handled through a .htaccess file; I won't get into too much detail here on how to set up the .htaccess file, but the entry should look something like this:

redirect permanent / http://www.example.com/

This issue comes up most often with content management systems and shopping carts, but it can also happen with a lot of WYSIWYG design tools like Dreamweaver. In some cases, it's not just the home page links that are a problem, but all of the links, for example where:

• http://www.example.com/articles/
  delivers the same content as
  
• http://www.example.com/articles/
  and you are linking to the latter version

Part of the configuration of your web server is which filename contains the Directory Index - if it's index.html, then you don't need to put / into your URLs.

So there you go, one thing for today - clean up those URLs and links. Tomorrow I'll talk about some other duplicate content issues, and how to use .htaccess to clean them up.

If you would like an expert to look over your site and give you a "to do list" for technical issues and improving your on-site search engine optimization, I offer a low-cost site review and SEO consultation package. Check it out if you need help, in my humble opinion it's the best deal in the business.