One of the things I would like to do for all of you is give you some education on proper SEO techniques so that you may either employ them yourselves or at least know some of the right questions to ask when looking for a marketing partner.
Canonicalization:
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices; and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same URLs:
* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp
Technically, however, all of these URLs are different, but have the same content. So a search engine spider could penalize your site for having duplicate content.
I am assuming if you are reading this that you are either engaging in a SEO campaign or are interested in doing so. The reason I bring this up is because if you intend to dedicate part of your marketing budget to search engine exposure than you have to be aware that some of the template sites that most agents are using these days gives you very limited access to the files in your site. Ideally you would want FTP access to be able to employ proper SEO methodologies but if you don’t then you can try a work around but keep in my mind SEO is sum of doing all the little things right.
So the best way to combat canonicalization is to use a 301 redirect. All this will do is tell the search engine spiders that www.example.com has moved to example.com permanently. This will eliminate the penalty for duplicate content.
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