Here's an interesting articles by Martin on linking to both forms of your domain name (name.com and www.name.com). One of the quirks of the search engines is that they look at these as different things. In fact, they can point to different places, so why they're usually the same, they don't have to be.

Also, google assigns page rank to each one differently. So if you look at the page rank for a page, SomeDomain.com, you may see that it doesn't match the www version: www.SomeDomain.com.

Note: Google, and the other search engines, constantly tweak their systems, so playing catch up is an ongoing game. The article below discusses getting your site listed twice in Google, but Google no longer does this. Any particular page of your site will show one for a given keyword, though it's certainly possible to have two separate pages ranking for the same keyword.

The rest of the remarks about different page names are still dead on and something to be aware of in your promotions.

Promoting Your Site Twice!

By: Martin Lemieux (Smartads - President)

I recently became aware that promoting your web site in Search Engines can instantly be double within Google! That's right, you can instantly promote your site 2 times at once!

So how do you Market Your Site twice?

Simple...

Most of us typically promote www.yoursite.com. But what you need to realize is that most sites can be found on search engines simply by entering... http://yoursite.com - without the www.

Try it for a second, lets go to google and type in your url with the www. and then without the www.

So for me it would be:

1. www.smartads.info
2. http://smartads.info

The same will apply for sub-domains as well. A sub-domain is a section of your site dedicated to something you create but instead of residing within your normal directory, it resides within it's own directory,like I've illustrated below...

• Normal: www.yoursite.com
• Sub-Domain: www.sub-domain.yoursite.com

And with that again, you can promote your sub-domain twice in Search Engines like so...

1. www.sub-domain.yoursite.com 
2. http://sub-domain.yousite.com

So in turn, I've just showed you how you can promote 4 sites with all the same goal in mind, yours of course!

How to utilize your new found knowledge:

Hopefully, you are all aware of how important it is to create a link exchange program for your business? Well, what you simply want to do is to mix up your links when submitting to other companies for a listing within their site.

In other words...

Lets say I just found 4 sites that I want to exchange links with, I would do something like this...

1. Site #1: I would submit (http://www.yoursite.com)
2. Site #2: I would submit (http://yoursite.com)
3. Site #3: I would submit (http://www.sub-domain.yoursite.com)
4. Site #4: I would submit (http://sub-domain.yoursite.com)

Now I'm promoting my site with 4 times the power than before!

But don't stop there...

Do you write articles? How about committing 2 of your links to every article. Change them up with each article.

Ex:

Article #1 (How to Submit Your Site to Search Engines)

Try adding www.yoursite.com or www.sub-domain.yoursite.com

Article #2 (How to Market Your Site Twice)

Try adding http://yoursite.com & http://sub-domain.yoursite.com

I hope this small timbit of knowledge gives you the edge you need to put your business ahead of the game!

Best of luck to you!

Martin Lemieux Smartads - President. http://www.smartads.info Affordable web site design, http://smartads.info Marketing Articles & Web Site Marketing Tactics

Depending on how you have your unix web host set up you can actually have name.com and www.name.com point to different pages. The "www" is called a "subdomain" and it usually, by default, points to name.com, but the search engines don't neccessarily see it that way.

You may have seen sites with something like www2.name.com. the www2 is just a subdomain and you can easily set this up with your hostnig service.

So experiment with Martin's suggestions and see if his SEO expertise helps you. You can also go behind the scenes with top search engine optimization experts and learn what they do to get their own sites to the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN and more.