Homepage Index vs Home vs Default?

KempRugeLawGroup

Should your home page be www.yoursite.com/index.htm or home.htm or default.htm on an apache server? Someone asked me this, and I have no idea. On our wordpress site, I have never even seen this come up, but according to my friend, every homepage HAS to be one of those three. So my question is which one is best for an apache server site AND does it actually have to be one of those three?

Thanks,

Ruben

BlueprintMarketing

Merry Christmas,

Ruben

Your friend is speaking about a 100% HTML site and the answer is your site should not end using

www.yoursite.com/index.htm or home.htm or default.htm

Using Word press your site should end in www.yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com/

Some people when they ring there site over from an HTML static site to WordPress they might find a parma links

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

If you do this and 301 redirect any links that would be changed by using WordPress to the new Permalink structure shown below or if you feel like using one of the others which I recommend against you may. However most sites are best served using the settings below.

Sincerely,

Thomas

mzwr77N.png

BlueprintMarketing

If you want more information yes Apache server does make

Most Apache web servers have set the following pages as the default page with a directory.

default.htm default.html index.htm index.html index.php

If using WordPress you could see index.php because WordPress

Uses a PHP Database regardless of what your friend told you ideally you should have

Properly 301 redirected static links when talking about links that are going to be seen by Google.

this

Means WordPress websites ideally should not contain publicly visible index file of any kind.

To cut to the chase I have cited this response from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team. to Yoast

Referenced from http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/

I emailed Matt and asked whether it makes sense to add .html for systems like WordPress. His response:

In general I wouldn’t. My WP has urls like http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/remove-result/ and that’s pretty ideal.

So. Case closed.

Should I add .html to my permalink structure?

A good collection of resources. Are posted as links below this line.

Use Yoast http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Is an excellent source of WordPress knowledge I strongly recommend using the Yoast WordPress seo tool the reason a side from being one of the very best Word press plug-ins that enhance your Word press site this one uses

http://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/

http://yoast.com/wp-content/permalink-helper.php

If you need to make changes to your link structure A great

resource I understand redirects is the link under this line

http://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/

If you need to redirect an index tag using Nginx

http://winginx.com/htaccess

http://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos

http://codex.wordpress.org/Linking_Posts_Pages_and_Categories