To www or not…Free Online Tool!

Posted by Laura Bergells

December 6, 2006

Will your online presence be known as www.yourcompanyname.com or simply yourcompanyname.com (no www)? How will you present yourself to the public? Which naming convention should you pick?

A free online tool can help you decide….but first:

As you develop your site and marketing plan, pick JUST ONE naming convention for how you refer to your site. It’s called canonicalization, and there are TWO important reasons why you want to pick JUST ONE way for referring to your website:

1. Branding. Get into good branding/naming habits early on to avoid confusion. Does your offline marketing (business cards, letterhead, signage, etc.) refer to your site with the www… or without? Stick to one way of referring to your company to help support a consistent brand image.

2. Search Engine Marketing. In order to determine your rank, major search engines count the inbound links to your site. If you don’t pick one or the other, you can degrade your inbound link count. And worse, sometimes the engines see the split as duplicate content, and you risk a penalty.

Make it easy for the engines to index you: pick a URL naming convention and stick with it. You’ll make it easy for your customers to find you, too.

Which canonical should you choose? Use this free canonical checker to determine how the search engines already see you. If a preponderance of your inbound links are already point to one canonical, your choice is made for you. Here’s a sample report for one of my sites:

canonical

Here, the choice was pretty much made for me! I’d be silly not to pick a www for this site, since that’s how the engines see most of my inbound links.

My next step is to make sure that a non-www does not exist at my site….and I did that in one easy step that took 5 minutes. Read more about why canonicalization is important…and how to set up your site to force one canonical or the other at my earlier post.