One thing I noticed today while working on various projects is that most webmasters seem to ignore a very easy, yet very important step when setting up a wordpress blog for solid SEO. Most webmasters seem to ignore Canonicalization as it’s related to SEO.

First Go to the permalink options in wordpress, check custom, type in /%postname%/
If you are using any other permalink option you are wasting your time, at least as far as SEO is concerned.

Open your .htaccess file and add this


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

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^\.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]


The above will force all links to start with www as well as force all links to end with a /

This alone can go a long way to fight duplicate content penalties in Google.