You’ve just completed your site. You have a unique offering to the public, but how are you going to get the word out?

If you’re going to get the maximum benefit from your future SEO activity you need to lay the proper foundation. Step one in the process is getting the proper URL structure set up.

The first decision you need to make is to decide whether you want your site to appear as www.mysite.com or just mysite.com in search results. There isn’t necessarily a difference, and it’s a matter of personal choice.

One factor that might help you make your decision is that less computer-savvy folks might be more inclined to add the www. before your address, whereas “techie” types will be more likely to use just mysite.com.

If your website is hosted on an Apache server, you can add this code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}  !^www.example.net$       [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)         http://www.example.net/$1  [L,R]

For an IIS server (with isapi_rewrite), you can use the following code:

Add this to your httpd.ini file:

RewriteCond Host: ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com$1 [I,RP]

If you want to rewrite your URL to the non-www version your Apache code would like:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Next up, creating the proper URL structure for your navigation.