The first on our series of SEO tips for the boutique website owner! This is a simple yet extremely effective way to get started. So here is the quick run-down….
When your website is left in its normal state, your urls can show up with either www.yourwebsite.com or yourwebsite.com every page can show up either way! The downside to this is that google can mistake BOTH versions of every page as separate pages, and then it thinks that you are spamming it with duplicate content/pages!

The fix makes all of your pages default to the www version of your website. so if yourwebsite.com is typed into the browser it automatically pops up to the www.yourwebsite.com version. This will avoid the duplicate content penalty and avoid links to your website being to both versions.

The FIX:

Add the following code to your .htaccess file in the main root folder of your website

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

Problem solved and you’ll be on your way to good clean SEO practices!