Before you invest any time or effort into Search Engine Optimisation for your web site, first make sure that your domain name is set up correctly.

Make sure that your website is available whether or not the visitor types the “www.” in front of your web sites address.

Different web browsers handle misconfigured domains differently.

• Internet Explorer will launch a search based on the domain name using your default search engine.
• Firefox will try both versions of the domain and eventually arrive at the available version
• Chrome and Opera report the misconfigured domain as an error.

So which ever browser your visitors are using, at best they will experience a delay and at worst they will interpret the error page presented to them as your site being unavailable.

In some cases your web hosting company may even have a holding page configured advertising their services on the badly configured version of the domain.

So what is an easy way to check if your domain?

Simply open your web browser (other that FireFox) and type the address of your web site into the address bar with the www. in front of it and then with out the www. in front. In both instances you should arrive at the home page of your web site.

For a more scientific approach you can do what is called pinging.

In Windows go to Start > Run > Cmd and then type ping www.YOURDOMAIN.com

You should see 4 lines of data appear similar to the ones in the picture below which start with the word reply.

Then do the same for YOURDOMAIN.com (it’s not case sensitive).

If the domain is misconfigured then you will the a message telling you that the domain cannot be found.

And if you discover that your domain is incorrectly configured, contact your web designer or your hosting company to let them know about the error.