In SEO many times quick and easy is a sure way to get a penalty on your site.  This isn’t always the case though.  There are a few sites out there that provide value while offering a link back to your site.

The site I am talking about right now is AboutUs.org.  It’s a directory of websites where you simply talk about your site.  You can include things such as contact info and a brief overview.

Initially you will find that your link is NoFollow.  Which is the way you tell Google you don’t trust the link.  It’s good that they do this, as you don’t want directories linking dofollow to the many spammy sites out there.  The link can be changed to dofollow with a little bit of work though.

First, you will want to edit your page and update it to contain all the info you can.  A short description, title, tags, and contact info are a great way to start.  Follow these guidelines here: http://www.aboutus.org/How_to_improve_AboutUs_pages

Once you have updated your site you can read this page: http://www.aboutus.org/DoFollow to see what steps you need to take to get the links changed to dofollow.

An example of one of my most recent sites is here: http://www.aboutus.org/ParkingGames.com.  You can see it’s just a basic overview of the site, providing some contact info and a nice little image.

Quick and easy links back to your site are few and far between.  AboutUs.org is a good start to getting the word out about your website.

Many webmasters don’t take any steps to ensure their website is accessed with http://www.example.com and not http://example.com. One reason to do this can include the presentation of your site in Google’s search results. Another reason is when you don’t control what address is presented, Google will make the decision for you. This can lead to issues with duplicate content, splitting of page rank and other SEO benefits, along with confusion when monitoring results in tools like Google Webmaster Tools.

When a person links to your site, they may simple link to http://example.com. Another person may link to http://www.example.com. This would be like looking at money.cnn.com vs www.cnn.com. Google treats these as different websites and can be harmful to the overall rankings for your site. It is generally a good idea to decide if you want to redirect non www to www.

The solution to this is a rather easy htaccess rule. To setup a htaccess rule you would create a file called .htaccess in the root folder of your website, sometimes referred to public_html/, or htdocs/.

To enable mod_rewrite, enter this line first if it doesn’t exist already:

RewriteEngine on

Then you would put this below:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

The first line reads the HTTP_HOST, and determines of the first 3 characters are www or not. If they are not, it continues onto the second line.

The second line takes the HTTP_HOST requested initially, and simply adds www. to it. The R=301 says that this is a HTTP code 301 permanent redirect, and the L tells the code to stop the rewriting process here and don’t apply any more rewrite rules.

To sum it up, a simple .htaccess file to redirect non www to www would be:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

It is also possible to redirect www.example.com to example.com. The code below will do that:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

I hope this simple mod_rewrite rule will help when you decide to redirect non www urls to www, or the other way around.