I have said that incoming links are very important. That is, you want to have the most incoming links to your pages possible, from the most relevant sites possible.  But should you link as www.huntsville-bike-parts.com or just use huntsville-bike-parts.com? 

Many of us are predisposed to including the www at this point, even though most of the time the www is irrelevant (with www and with out www will usually take you to the same place). Others see the www as extraneous and leave it off  and many times you see the www omitted on billboards, trucks and ads. The answer is either, but not both.

The issue is that most search engines (Google lets you declare a preference) will see these as different and index each separately dividing the rank for the content between the two. This is not desirable.

My suggestion? It may be cleaner visually to use mywebsite.com, but I recommend that you always include the www as a raft programs (MS Word, WordPress, and others) recognize the www as the start of a URL and automatically link the text. While this may seem trivial, all those emails, blog and forum postings, you do can add up and you want any references to your site that may be found on the web to be linked.

To demonstrate a similar case, I was trying to be aesthetically clean, listing www.mywebsite.com in press releases. When I later was checking through releases on various news sites, I was surprised to find that in older releases where the http:// had been included, the text was linked — which was the point in the first place! 

The bottom line here is using the www, and in some cases even adding the (yuck!) http:// can work to your advantage. The only place leaving it off may help, is in your print ads.

BTW — I busily edit out all of WordPress’ auto-linking to the fictitious www.huntsville-bike-parts.com site, otherwise this blog would have many links to it.