This is pretty easy to setup by adding this to your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mydomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please note, you will need to change mydomain.com to your actual domain name.

Once you have done so, both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com will both send you to www.mydomain.com. This is usually done for search engine optimization reasons, to prevent the search engines from seeing your one web site as two different web sites.

You can also force your domain to drop the www from the address when typed in, if you would rather have it the other way around. In that situation, you would need to add this to your .htaccess file:

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

Please note, you will need to change mydomain.com to your actual domain name.

This will make both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com send you to just mydomain.com.   Hope this comes in handy the next time you are optimizing your own websites.

Once you do, you get all kinds of neat facts, statistics and advice on what you can do to improve your website’s score.

Just to give you an example of how this website works – Mitchelaneous got a score of 97 – which I think is pretty darn good.  So what does that mean exactly?

A website grade of 97/100 for www.mitchelaneous.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 97% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

Some of the places where it says I need improvement are the fact that I have "too many images" on the website, which I don’t really see as that much of a factor.  Also, I need to apparently renew my domain this year.

Now, like with any automated service – you have to learn how to take the advice you are given.  No website can take the place of learning the ropes when it comes to learning how to really create a fantastic website – however Website Grader can get you pointed in the right direction.

To give it a shot on your own website, be sure to go visit websitegrader.com.

Building and hosting successful forums on your website can be a lot of hard work.  Just like you would do if you were building a house, you have to build your forums with a good foundation.  Here I have for you seven different successful forum rules you should keep in mind when you either set up a forum script, or look to redo some of your forums to make them easier for users to navigate through.

Here is my general advice for anybody out there looking to start their own forums.

1. Enable Really Simple Syndication
   You want to give people as many routes into your forums as they need.  Making sure your forum has an RSS feed gives your users one more way to keep up to date on what is happening on your forums.
2. Use an SEO Friendly Permalink Structure
   You have to have a good permalink structure to keep the search engines happy, when they are crawling over your forums.  Use page paths like "this-works-great" rather than "index=conversation2".  By using a better permalink structure, you will get ranked a little higher in search results.
3. Only Make the Forums as Complex as You Need
   Do not go overboard adding a new forum category for every wild idea you think people might want to talk about.  Only create a new category or sub-forum if there is a real need or desire for it coming from the people who use your forums.
4. Find Good People to Help You Moderate Conversations
   Once your forums have been up and running for a while, you might look towards the community you have created for people who will help you enforce the forum rules, and keep the forums active.
5. Set Some Basic Rules for Posting
   From day one, you should have a basic list of rules for people to follow.  My best advice for this situation is to keep this list somewhere where everybody can see it, and keep it simple.  If you get too complex with your rules, nobody will read them.
6. Help Feed the Discussions
   Stop in daily and see what conversations you can reply to, and try to find topics of discussion that might get more people to come by and post their thoughts, ideas, feedback or solutions.
7. Link to Your Forums from Other Places
   You need to work hard at getting new links to your forums.  You can do this from your website (if you have one) and other like-minded websites that might share the same general discussion point of your forums.

Have another rule of your own that I might have missed?  Makes sure you leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.  Learn to take care of your little community,  and make sure their needs are being met. Also, always welcome feedback, because if people care enough to complain – it means they want your forums to succeed.

When you are starting up a new website, one of the big concerns seems to be if the search engines have found it yet. I have talked with many a stressed out webmaster who have lost their faith in the world, just because Google has not yet crawled their newly launched website.  Here are a few suggestions to make sure your website gets found by the search engines out there.

Get Links Back to Your Website: The oldest technique is often still the best one to use to make sure you get crawled by Google.  Make sure you get other like-minded websites to link back t your new website.  Google crawls through links, so if the indexing robots finds a link to your website – it will make the jump and start looking around your website too.

Request to be Listed/Crawled: You can also request search engines crawl your website.  While Google still have it’s old add your URL to Google page still up – the better way to do this is to setup a Google Webmaster account.  Both Bing and Yahoo provide you with the same tools to make sure your websites are listed in those engines too.

This article should help you when it comes to finding the right places to register:

• Search Engine Webmaster Tool Collections

Don’t Fall for Search Engine Optimization Gimmicks: There are a lot of places online that will boast that they can get you listed in 1,000 different search engines for just 4 monthly payments of $49.99 (or something to that effect).  There is nothing they can do that you can’t do on your own.

Now, the most important tip I can give you is to give it time.  If you launch a website on Monday, that doesn’t mean that Tuesday your website will be listed all over Google.  Spend time building up your content and giving the various search engines great content to find. By doing that, and the steps above – you will soon forget about being stressed over not being listed and satisfying an entirely new audience of people coming in from the search engines.

Check your website’s social ranking status with Siteholic.  This neat tool will give you a lot of details concerning your domain’s age, Google PageRank and other search engine and social network ranking statistics you need to keep track of.  The best thing about it is, it keeps all these details, all in one location, on one very simple page.

Now, I love to keep tabs on all the statistics of my websites – this way I know what I might need to improve, where I am doing good, and site building techniques I might not have thought about before.  Some of the details Siteholic provides to you about any domain include:

• Domain’s Age
• Google Backlinks
• Google Indexed Pages
• Bing Indexed Pages
• Site Value
• Digg Links
• Google Bot Last Visit
• and much more!

Here are a few more details about the tool from the developer:

Having a website with good content does not get you results. The next step is getting your website indexed in various major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. If your website is not listed and indexed in these search engines, people would never come to know about the existence of your site. Also it is important to know about the social bookmarking and how people are sharing your site.

Get a holistic view of your website ranking and social media presence.  Go check out siteholic.com!

Looking for a way to embed articles or images into your own website layout?  Embed Anything is an interesting new service that delivers you the chance to embed both on the fly.  The idea here is simple, let your visitors embed your content – rather than just taking it.

Here are a few key reasons for giving Embed Anything a shot.

• Embedded content comes with a link back to build SEO and traffic
• Embedded content is invisible to search engines
• Ad space contained within each embed lets you monetize embedded content
• Reporting and control over which sites are embedding your content

So when somebody sees an image or an article on your website they would like to use, they will be offered the chance to embed it, rather than just copying it locally.  This gives them an easier way to grab your content and re-publish it.  It gives you the chance to gain a few more eyeballs with a link or two you might not have gotten without the service.

Overall I think it is a neat idea.

So if you want to offer a new way to share your content out there, I would say give Embed Anything a shot.  I am really interested to see some real world feedback on it, to see how useful this service and tool is in the long run.

The Linkbait Generator is here to help you come up with a topic that will sure to grab eyeballs.

For those of you outside of the blogging circle, let me explain what linkbait is. Linkbait is something posted or written about that people will notice and link back to.  By linking to your site, other sites are saying they value the content of your site and that they think other people will be interested in it, too.

Now the Linkbait Generator might be a little tongue in cheek, but I am going to use it for a while – and see if the headlines really inspire me to come up with the greatest blog post ideas ever created.  Go bookmark it for your own use at: linkbaitgenerator.com.

Your meta description says a lot about your web page.  If you get a lot of visitors from Google, it could be the only thing you have to use to sell them on clicking that link to find out more information.  So what steps can you take to make your search engine snippets stand out?

I have a few simple tips to share:

• Ensure each page has a unique meta description.  Each page has different content, so you should make sure your meta description reflects the content inside.
• How about length?  Ideally, your meta description should be kept between 70 and 160 characters long.
• Make sure it is explicit enough and contains keywords relative to that web page’s content.

For more help with meta descriptions, check out these two resources:

• Improve Snippets with a Meta Description Makeover
• The Meta Element via Wikipedia

This should make for a fun weekend project, and I can promise you will see even more traffic from the various search engines out there.

WooRank is an impressive new web site analysis tool worth singing the praises of.  I have several of these types of online tools bookmarked, and I have written about most of them.  The thing that separates WooRank’s analysis of a domain over any other tool is the plethora of information they provide to you.

After submitting mitchelaneous.com to the site, I found out tons of information I can turn around and use to make my web site even better.  Here are some of the details this online tool provides to you:

• Visitors
• Content
• In-Site SEO
• Home analysis
• Inside analysis
• Website compliance
• Off-Site SEO
• Popularity
• Directories
• Social Media
• Usability
• Website information
• Server
• Domain
• Related websites

WooRank is definitely my new favorite tool to find out how I can make my web sites better.  I got a WooRank of 53.1.  Can you beat me?  Plug your own domain name into WooRank.com and see what score you get.

Often our web site statistics we gather are there to help us do better, but very rarely are we rewarded for them doing well.  GoingUp! is not only a great new web site analytics tracker, but it will also pay you back in return.

Having a good web site analytics package is key to having a successful web site.  You have to know what your visitors like, what they don’t like, and where you could improve.

What type of information will GoingUp! track?  It does just about everything:

• Complete Web Site Stats
• Keyword Position Tracking
• Actions and Goals
• Google PageRank Tracking
• Recent Visitor Maps/Locations
• Heat Maps
• Page Optimizer Tool

Plus it features a customizable dashboard that will help you pull up all the data you need to see, right off the bat.  GoingUp! integrates popular analytics and search engine optimization tools in one easy-to-use interface to see how your website is performing from all points-of-view.

• Free Web Site and SEO Tools from GoingUp!

So where does the payback come from, that I mentioned before?

GoingUp! now lets you earn points while using our web analytics tracking. Soon, you’ll be able to use these points for premium services such as search engine promotion, keyword rank monitor and more. Plus, you can even turn your points into cash or prizes.

That is a unique spin that will defiantly entice a few to give it a shot.  The best part about it all, is that it is free to try – so why not give it a spin?

You can learn more about or sign up for GoingUp! at GoingUp.com.