What's a good column without a bad pun for the title? Answer: a better column.

We're going to geek it up a bit this week and take a look at canonical URLs, subdomains and "PageRank". Those terms may be foreign to you, but if you want your site to show up near the top of search rankings, then you should get to know them.

These terms all fall under the broad umbrella of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is the practice of designing and developing your website so it will be seen higher on search rankings.

When you type a search term into Google or Yahoo, they return a list of web pages that that they believe are the most relevant to the terms you are looking for. By understanding how they do this, we can help set up your site to show up higher in the search results, and this draws more traffic. So before I explain how to create canonical URLs by eliminating subdomains so you can consolidate PageRank - or even what that means - let's look at how the search engines generate their listings.

What's a good column without a bad pun for the title? Answer: a better column.

We're going to geek it up a bit this week and take a look at canonical URLs, subdomains and "PageRank". Those terms may be foreign to you, but if you want your site to show up near the top of search rankings, then you should get to know them.

These terms all fall under the broad umbrella of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is the practice of designing and developing your website so it will be seen higher on search rankings.

When you type a search term into Google or Yahoo, they return a list of web pages that that they believe are the most relevant to the terms you are looking for. By understanding how they do this, we can help set up your site to show up higher in the search results, and this draws more traffic. So before I explain how to create canonical URLs by eliminating subdomains so you can consolidate PageRank - or even what that means - let's look at how the search engines generate their listings.