URL Format – www or not

I didn’t realise WordPress defaulted to www

This is not a WordPress default issue.

If your host has setup things right, your site should resolve to both

https://wilsonsdance.co.uk/

and

https://www.wilsonsdance.co.uk/

Note: your host is redirecting the first URL to the latter. Ask them about that.

I am totally new to all this. I signed up with a hosting provider a week ago and developed my website in 10 hours using the Twenty Twelve Theme but I’m struggling with all the SEO stuff. In fact it’s been harder that the web design. My research lead me to think the address may be an issue. If you look in WordPress General Settings the WordPress Address URL and Site Address URL default to https://www.wilsonsdance.co.uk. I never set those up. My host provider says none of this is an issue and certainly if I enter https://www.wilsonsdance.co.uk or wilsonsdance.co.uk they both resolve to my website. I was just concerned that the sitemap generated shows www urls and as I’m having problems with getting google to recognise my site I didn’t know if this was the issue or not.

Since the host would redirect the non www url’s anyway, you are best to keep it in the settings. It is OK either way (see below however). Just make sure you use the WWW at all social sites, or with tools like Google Webmaster Tools/Analytics etc for uniformity. Those url’s will be the ones listed if in your sitemap and not otherwise found on the web.

What can be an issue is if folks try to use the non www url for the site and you also add additional redirects. This often causes a ‘redirect loop’ .

You also need to give the search engines time to find site. For now, work on content and good content is what will best get your site noticed.

Thanks for taking the time to explain this to me. My website is basic and really there just to market my dance classes but there is another school nearby that appears in the first ten entries that google returns as they have a number of different domains registered which all resolve to the same website. Their site in itself is quite poor but they are getting the hits and they have obviously got their head around the key words issue. I have installed the all in one SEO plugin and went through the process of populating meaningful titles, descriptions and key words for each page and probably went a bit overboard with the number of key words I used. However, I have now read somewhere that search engines don’t use this field as they build their own list from the content of each page submitted in the sitemap. Do you know if this is this correct ??

Well, they ‘prefer’ that if you use a keyword, that that exact keyword is in the ‘content’. If your site just adds a lot of keywords and they are not in the content, that looks to Google (and other search engines) like spammy behavior (trying to get a better rank with such methods is not going to help with getting the site found more in search, in fact it can hurt). Follow that and again writing good content (add keywords that are in the content and don’t overdue or use generic terms) and some time will prove best.

Excellent. Thank you so much for these pointers. I had tried to use key words for each page that appear on my website but also include mis-spellings of some of them. Maybe my thought process was wrong here. But people sometimes refer to Argentine Tango as Argentina Tango, or Wilson’s Dance spelled as wilsons dance (without the apostrophe) but I guess google is clever enough to pick up on these things as I often get a search return that says “did you mean….”. Your advice sounds good and I will rethink my approach.