How do I increase our search ranking?

The best first step is to optimize your content. There are a lot of factors to look into, so I'll save that for next week. Next, increase your Page Rank and your site's importance by building inbound links. Provide reasons for listeners to link to your site on their blogs, like local weather, news, and traffic - or (shameless self-plug) a service that allows jocks to update their site daily with new, interesting stories and links. Also, get local sites of importance to link to you, like the local newspaper, the city's website, local sports teams, etc.

It will take weeks and months to see the results of these efforts, but you may be able to get quicker results from this fix. Check what happens when you visit your site. Go to http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com . Now check your address bar. Is the "www" still there? Now go to just http://YOURDOMAIN.com . Check your address bar again. Is the "www" missing? If the URL in your address bar is different after you visit both of those addresses - then Google may see them as two different pages. Notice how if you type in "http://allaccess.com" - you get invisibly and instantly redirected to "http://www.allaccess.com"? That's good.

All Access is using a canonical URL for its homepage (it also uses frames, so the address bar doesnt't change - but that's another discussion). A Canonical URL means that every page has only one URL. If you see the same page whether or not you use a "www" in front of your domain name, they that page does not have a Canonical URL. This is important - because since a page is ranked by how many people link to it, if half of the people link to the page with a "www" and half link to the page without it - then your page will only be half as high as it could be in the rankings.

So, let's get rid of the "www", which is an unnecessary subdomain. (in a URL, it is Subdomain.Domain.TLD - Top Level Domain). If you register the domain, you have rights to all of the subdomains underneath it. "WWW" made sense over a decade ago when people used different servers for FTP and the web, but now we can get rid of it to create a canonical domain. If you are using Apache - the most popular web server program (it's probably Apache or IIS if you have Windows hosting) - add these lines to the ".htaccess" file in your web root directory:

*** CODE ***

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^YOURDOMAIN\.com
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [R=301,L]

*** END CODE ***

Remember to replace "YOURDOMAIN" with your site's domain name. With this code, anytime anyone types in or is linked to your site with the "www" subdomain, they will now be instantly and seamlessly redirected to the exact page they are looking for, but the "www" will be dropped. Plus, Google, which had two copies of every page on your site, one with the "www" and one without - will now combine the listings, pushing you further up the search result page.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Search Engine Optimization. Next week, we'll look at optimizing your content for search engines.

As always, AllAccess has my “The Net Untangled Tip of the Day” each weekday and a column on Website Wednesdays. So check back and together we’ll get our internet presence focused on keeping radio strong in this world of increasing competition.

Do you agree with me? Or am I full of hot air? If you have comments or any questions about radio websites – either general questions relating to the industry or the web or even specific (HTML, PHP, .NET, Javascript, etc.) questions, send me an email through http://Preppermint.net/contact . I’ll answer your question quickly and maybe even use it for a future column.