I have a godaddy 'website tonight' that I've been using for potential clients with some real estate info. I want the website to have better ranking for certain keyword phrases. I have a SEO guy working on it and he says that godaddy website tonight does not have HTACCESS so when the website address starts with www. instead of non-www., google sees it as a duplicate webpage. Without HTACCESS, this cannot be corrected. He says that it's affecting my website's ability to go up in seo rankings & that I should switch to a wordpress site. Another issue he mentioned is that my website address has hyphens in it and sometimes the search engine bots read the hyphens as underscores which also needs to be redirected with HTACCESS. Does anyone think that what he is saying is correct? I appreciate the feedback.

There is some truth to what he says regarding "www" and non-www although if you do not have.htaccess you can tell Google to use www by using Google's Webmaster Tools service.

As far as hyphens and underscores go what he says is bunk. Google treats them both the same - as word separators. They have no negative affect on ranking. At one time they had a positive affect but now the effect is neutral.

Yep. The #1 guy in Forth Worth Texas has hyphens and such and does just fine.

Would you say Wordpress would do better in SEO rankings than a godaddy website tonight- generally speaking?

It helps at first, because each time you create new content Wordpress pings by default and lets search engines know there's something new to get indexed.

In the long-run there's no difference - after you get some decent links to your site and create new content on a regular basis your website will get visited by search spiders probably as often as if it were on a wordpress platform.

I was just checking some reciprocal links to see if they were still reciprocating and one site was a Godaddy site. Noticed that the site has no Title - just "Home Page" - or Meta Tags. So, out of the box these sites will do nothing in search engines. If you want to use one of these sites you do need to know how to make it rank.

As well, I kept getting "server busy" messages while trying to access the site. That really surprised me as I would think if anyone had enough server power it would be GoDaddy.

So, the answer to your question is that Wordpress would do better. It puts in the Title and Meta Tags automatically.

Atlanta Guy is right that in the long run a Wordpress site is no better than a well SEO'd conventional website. What allows Wordpress to get a quicker start than a conventional site is that Google treats blogs and forums as "news" so as long as you are posting frequently those new posts get indexed right away and rank well right away. If you just let your blog site there is no benefit. You need to use a blog to see the benefits.

Godaddy supports using htaccess files I use them all the time.

Wordpress is excellent at SEO just make sure the titles are relevant to the data.

Hyphens and Underscores are the same but being a programmer I tend to favor underscore because the - has meaning in come languanges but its neutral on the web just force of habit. Some were using + for a while.

What your referring to is called canonical url, just using webmaster tools will not solve your problem, but it certainly helps, log into your godaddy account using ftp, and the directory you connect to first, put the htaccess file in there, that is the web root.

I suggest everyone runs from godaddy as fast as possible, for one main reason. They limit your bandwidth to 80kb. Their are much better hosts, host monster, host gator,Ipower there are so many great hosting companies. They use Cpanel which is a simple interface compared to godaddies mess.
About Wordpress or any opensource CMS, there are things to consider who is going to install it? who is going to customize it? Who is going to keep it updated? what are you going to do if the widgets your using are not updated? all these questions make for a very stressful web presence. This goes for drupal, joomla etc all of them.

So....godaddy is not a good choice..?

Godaddy is a great domain registrar but a poor choice for hosting if they have such low bandwidth limits. The post by Whitehatseo gu above gives the reason for the "server busy" messages that I was receiving. What good is a site if visitors can't access it because you have such a small allotment of bandwidth?

There are better choices.

What he needs to do is a permanent 301 redirect from www.yoursitehere.com to yoursitehere.com. Google views both sites as separate until you do this. The issue is not so much one of duplicate content as it is of links and getting credit for the backlinks he builds.

Say you built 100 links to: www.yoursitehere.com. then he goes and builds 100 links to yoursitehere.com until you do a 301 redirect from the www. version to the non www. version you will not get credit for all 200 links effectively slowing down the seo process.

you can do the redirect through .htaccess or generally your registrar or host has a simple section where you can just check off the 301 redirect.

Wordpress is absolutely a better choice SEO wise and you will probably garner better rankings using it as opposed to Godaddy website tonight. Wordpress is free use it! The bulk of my wordpress clients rank faster than the non wordpress ones (mostly cause wordpress is ready to go out of the box so to speak).

WordPress' admin panel gives you the option to set the canonical URL. However, even though WordPress is a good CMS, this option should not be the deciding factor for choosing it (since there are many other ways in which you can set the canonical URL).

Adding my vote here...

Register your domains at GoDaddy if you must but don't host there! In fact, stay away from GoDaddy altogether (just google godaddy sucks to learn more).

Register your domains at NameCheap and host at HostGator, you'll be far better off.

Also...I think the SEO guy is BS when it comes to the hyphens.