Nearly all search engines, including Google, recognize www.mysite.com and mysite.com as two different websites. This is very bad for SEO reasons. Instead of having one site listed highly in the search engines, you will have two sites with less importance. See more about SEO/SEM to learn why.

To fix this, we can create a very simple .htaccess file to redirect any traffic from mysite.com to www.mysite.com, that way all incoming traffic hits the same URL, and Google gives all of the page ranking importance to one website.

Open up an ASCII text editor such as Notepad and create the following file, named htaccess.txt:

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

Next, upload this file to your server (to the root directory of your website) and change the filename from "htaccess.txt" to ".htaccess". That's all there is to it.

Although less common, you can also implement this strategy with reverse thinking, sending all www traffic to a non-www URL. To do this, you would replace the aforementioned code with the following:

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

NOTE: Only use one of these two code segments.

Hopefully any questions that you may have had about htaccess files and www-redirects have just been cleared up. If not, please feel free to send an email to Info@asisbiz.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tags