Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Robots.txt File in SEO Optimized

Robots.txt File in SEO Services

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Generally in case of small websites webmasters are under false assumption that they do not require to create a robot.txt file. But it is required. First of all let us define the robot.txt file. Even prior to it we need to define what a web robot is. A web robot is also called spider or crawler which should not be confused with the normal web browser as web browser is not a robot.

The main use of robots.txt file for webmasters in SEO services is to give instructions to the robot what they crawl and what should not be crawled. This can give you some control over the robots. This give you little more control over the robots and this indicates that you can issue indexing instructions to various search engines.

Robots.txt invites the search engines. Some of the good bots can also step away from your website in case you have not created robot.txt in the top level of your website. Some time there is requirement to exclude some pages from search engines. These are those pages that are still under construction and those directories that you do not want to get them indexed. You may also want to exclude those search engines whose main aim is to collect email addresses.

Robot.txt file is a simple text file created in notepad. This is required to be saved to the root directory of your website. It means that directory where your home page or index page is stored. In order to create a simple robot.txt file with the specification that allows all robots to spider your website, write the following info:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

This will allow all robots to index your pages.

In case you don’t want a specific robot to have access any of your website pages. Then do the following:

User-agent:specificbot

Disallow: /

In case you do not want a specific robot to access any of your web pages, then do the following. Suppose you do not want Googlebot to index a page names as “abc” and you directory name is newdir. In the disallow section you will be required to put:

User-Agent: Googlebot

Disallow:/newdir/abc.html

IN case you do not want to get indexed the complete directory then you would put:

Now if it's a complete directory you do not want indexed you would put:

User-Agent: Googlebot

Disallow:/newdir/abc.html/

By putting forwarding slash in the beginning and in the end, search engines are informed that not to include any of the directories.

Thus create a robot. Text is an important part in SEO services and it can not be ignored at all costs.

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Most Important Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Web Site

Businesses in Orlando are looking more and more to the web to promote and sell products, services and events. Is the web site you built with a vision of customers, sales and passive income bringing in the income or traffic you thought it would? If not, don't fret - small steps such as refreshing content or distributing an optimized press release may be all it takes to bring in new visitors. Try one or all of the following tips to begin directing more traffic to your site:

Refresh Content

Updated content is the key to return visitors and bringing in new traffic. Easy ways to add new content are via blogs or forums. If new content ideas aren't flowing freely, create a mind map or idea cloud and branch off from there. Make it a goal to update your content, including adding new content, at least once a day for an entire month. At the end of the month, analyze your traffic to decide which content is bringing in the most new traffic. Adding a news section to your site and including an updated optimized press release to announce new products or services is another way of updating content when your ideas seem to dry up.

Promote your Site

Increase awareness of your site by frequenting sites that your target customer would visit and leaving comments, suggestions and advice that links back to your site. Another option is to announce new products or services by creating an optimized press release and uploading it to your site as well as related sites, newswire services, and social media sites. A well formatted optimized press release consists of two to three targeted keywords related to your business - use those keywords strategically throughout your optimized press release to begin ranking for those terms in the major search engines. Promoting your site is an effective way of reaching new visitors that are looking for services similar to yours.

Analyze Site Functionality

If your site hasn't been updated recently or the scope of what the site was meant for has changed, it may be time to update make some updates. Making small changes like rearranging the navigation so that a visitor can easily reach target pages, placing important content above the fold, and adding new sections to the home page are all items to consider. If you've started adding a news section, you can feature your optimized press release on the home page each week, increasing the odds that new visitors will find your site via the keywords you used. Also make sure to view meta tags including Title, Description and Keywords and utilize the use of H1 tags and Page Titles throughout your site. If this seems foreign to you, reach out to one of the Orlando internet marketing firms to have them analyze your site and consult with you.

Update Site Design

Your site design may be holding back your business, as well. A site that is poorly designed or is hard to read - think pink text on an orange background - will deter visitors from coming back or recommending your site to others. To get an idea of what works and what doesn't, check out your competitor web sites and take notes. If design isn't your forte, contact an Orlando web design firm to re-do your site. If a redesign is in the cards, plan the design considering functionality and future plans down the road. Use the site redesign as an opportunity to promote your business as well, including distributing an optimized press release to industry related media.

Directing traffic to your web site doesn't have to be a hectic process. Building a site and creating a place that visitors will return to takes a lot of patience and effort. By being prepared and planning out what methods to use, such as an optimized press release or web design, your traffic worries will be a thing of the past.

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Seo Basic And Tips

As many internet marketers and web developers know, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is required on your website. A website without good SEO planning can often lead to it being lost in amongst millions of sites resulting in the website never receiving little or no visitors at all. SEO should not only be beneficial to you but also the Search Engine and the visitors. This article gives tips on good SEO practices and provides readers with suggestions to help maintain a website that is SEO friendly.

SEO, known as Search Engine Optimisation, is a practice of making your website friendly to Search Engines and visitors. The belief towards making your website friendly for Search Engines is that it will result in higher rankings and positioning for keywords and ultimately first page location. This idea works hand in hand with visitors who, after keying in your keyword, should see a website that is easy to read, well written, informative and providing information that they have been looking for, whether this is a sales page, general topic information etc.

The first area I look at when I'm designing a new website or doing research is the webpage title. This is the written text found at the very top of the browser not the name of your website. Your webpage title should contain your most prominent and searched for keywords. For example, if you have a website about car hire in London, you could include the following in your title: "London Car Hire, Car Rental, Van Hire, Vehicle Hire". During my research, I often find well designed and pretty webpages that only contain the name of the webpage in the webpage title and as a result limit themselves in searches to only the name of their website. One factor which is so important is to include keywords in your title of your website thus resulting in a better possible match for the search engine when the relevant words are typed in. Try and limit the title to about 60-70 characters, including spaces, as search engines may penalize you for having too many words in the title of your page. Many people also use variances on words. For example, 'colour' and 'color' or 'mum' and 'mom', depending which country they are targeting. Also, the title should read correctly not something like 'Car Hire Carhire London, Vanrental, hire....' etc.

Once I've decided on my keywords for my title, I ensure that they are included in my webpage in the HTML code and in the <h1> headings. If you go to a webpage, click on 'View' then 'Source' this will result in viewing HTML programming of the page. In most cases somewhere near the top of the code you should see 'META KEYWORDS' and <h1> titles. Good SEO practice says that you should include in your webpage title your meta keywords. If you have too many keywords than the recommended length of the webpage title, you should include in your title the main ones you want to target. Regarding <h1> title tags, this is predominately for titles on the page. I often use the website title on the page at the top, including the same words in the title to let the visitor know what the website is about.

Now I have my webpage title containing my keywords, my meta keywords listed and my <h1> title, I then design and write my webpage. Keeping a note of my keywords, the first paragraph starts with one of the keywords. I write several paragraphs on the page and within in the paragraphs I write around my keywords, varying them. I try and aim to include the keyword once in each paragraph. Remember, you have to ensure that your paragraph reads as it should to the visitor and makes sense. If your keywords are mentioned too often, this will get picked up by the search engine and can be detrimental.

Once I have written my page, I try and finish it with the same keyword that I started the page with. If it was 'Car Hire' then I finish with 'Car Hire'. Now I have finished my page, I check everything off: The Header containing the name of my website, the left panel containing the navigation menu and the main panel containing the text with my keywords in each paragraph, including spelling and grammar.

Now I have my webpage and I publish it, I then go about promoting the page itself rather than the whole website. Many internet marketers I know concentrate on getting links to the website rather than the webpage. Personally, I would always concentrate on getting links to the page which ultimately leads to links in my site. Firstly, I deep link where I can, remembering not to over do it. The process is when you link from one page in your website to another page in your website. The most common way of deep linking is through anchor texts - links on words that take you to another page. Example: the anchor text for 'work from home' is highlighted below which takes me to a page about working from home. Your anchor text used should be a keyword for the resulting page. In this case, 'Work From Home' is a keyword for the landing page, the page shown when the visitor clicks on the highlighted text. After I've deep linked my pages, I then look at getting links to the pages.

Links to the pages are simple - anchor texts. I write 1 article containing 3 anchor texts of 3 keywords found in the title and on the webpage and vary it 5 times by changing paragraphs, titles, sentences and resource box details. I then send my 5 articles to 20 - 30 article directories. If all 30 directories publish 1 article, then that's 90 anchor texts pointing to the targeted webpage. Just imagine if all 5 are published.

Lastly, I submit to free directories (and paid ones) the website details and vary the anchor text alternating my keywords, and I use SEO Software to find reciprocal linking partners with the same keywords and to continue my SEO research.

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What is Anchor Text and how To Improve It

One of the most prevailing and talked about issues on the web today is getting traffic to your website. The reasons: more traffic will generate income, more traffic gets your advice and opinions heard and to be contactable. Regardless of your reason to run your own site and the results of running your own site, virtually all website owners want to be on the first page of the search engine. The feeling makes you feel important and satisfied that your e-work has paid off.

To help achieve these most sort after positions in search engines without having to spend any money is actually quite easy. You will hear the phrase SEO mentioned all the time throughout the web as a way to help achieve the somewhat elusive front page, number one positions. You will also hear that as part of your SEO (there are 2 parts) you need to generate links to your site. Apart from reciprocal linking and paying for links you can in fact do it all yourself.

The best way to get links for your specific keywords is by using Anchor Texts. Some people refer to them an Anchor Links. Whenever I peruse article directories, which I do daily, I read so many articles where that author might just include a URL link. Often, after reading the submission guidelines, I notice that authors can include anchor links and haven't done so and is ultimately a waste of an opportunity.

To place anchor text in your article is a really simple process. Once you have located your keyword you need to place the following code before the keyword -a href="www.yourdomain.com"- replacing yourdomain with the name of your website and putting < before the 'a' at the beginning of the code and > at the end. Then you place the code after your keyword. The end result should read -a href="www.yourdomain.com">xxxxx- and when formatted will read as it should as per the examples below.

The believed outcome is as followed. Search engines like anchor texts as the words are made prominent to a search engine. Therefore, when a surfer types in the keywords that you have anchor text for, the search engine picks up a match between your keywords pointing to your domain and the search words inputted by the surfer. The more anchor texts that you have for the same words searched for the more chance you have of getting on the front page of the search engine. Now the hardest part for many isn't generating the keyword lists it is the publishing of the content that contains the anchor text keywords. Chances are, you will require many of the same anchor text keywords on many sites for it to show results and that many other people will be targeting the same keywords. However, it can be achieved with persistence and a bit of research. Using the term "allinanchor: *keyword*" in Google shows the amount of webpages that use the same keyword that you are targeting.

Please remember, this is just one of a variety of SEO principles and should be used as part of the overall process.

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Link Building Strategies & Tactics

Link building, an exercise where the webmaster/ link building campaign manager attempts to get a large quantity of good quality inbound links to a website, is undoubtedly among the most important activities in a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. In fact, the result of link building efforts could well be the tie-breaker for search engines when ranking two equally competent (in terms of content relevance) search engine friendly websites.

Many webmasters/ SEO professionals ignore the good quality aspect of link building and focus only on the quantity objective. As a result, they try to obtain links from any website that is willing to give a link. However, as search engines get smarter and their ranking algorithms more stringent, this approach can be quite counter-productive, or at best, totally ineffective. Therefore, in the overall gamut of link building, the PageRank of the linking page & site relevance plays a vital role. For example, one link from a PR3 link page could be equivalent to 15 links from a PR0 link page (an empirical statement without a mathematical basis). Likewise, a few links from sites that are topically very relevant are worth lots more than hundreds of links from completely irrelevant sites. Therefore, it is very crucial to focus on developing and executing a thematic link building campaign as part of the SEO efforts for a site.

As the name suggests, thematic link building is the process of obtaining links from sites that are thematically relevant with the recipient's website. Obviously, this involves a lot more research effort and is quite labor intensive than just approaching any webmaster for a link.

I've listed below a couple of approaches in a series of steps to execute such a link building campaign. Note however, that such a campaign is slow and requires immense patience. Depending on where you are located, and the number of links you require to make a difference to your SEO campaign, the cost of following these approaches can be prohibitive (in terms of time and the effort versus result ratio). It will make sense, in such cases, to opt for offshore link building companies and professionals to execute the campaign, though it must be done with clear guidelines and agreement on the process to be followed and the quality considerations.

Approach 1 to thematic link building:

1. Analyze the objective, theme and content of the website for which link building is being done (parent website).
2. Shortlist the keywords revolving around the parent website's theme.
3. Post a query in the search engines for the shortlisted keyword one by one.
4. Collate the top 100 websites showing up for these queries.
5. Analyze each of these websites and determine the best possible way of a possible inclusion of the parent website on the shortlisted website. This could be through a link addition on their resource page/ posting an article & getting the attribution for the same/ by posting a comment on their website.
6. Send a customized e-mail to the webmaster requesting for an addition of the link to your site(If the addition of the link is possible by submitting of a form or posting a comment, then you can skip this step).
7. Follow up with a reference to the original contact if you don't hear back. However, don't follow up more than thrice if you don't get a response; this is a clear indication that the person on the other end is not interested.

Be careful in the selection of websites to be approached, you should not contact a direct competitor's website prospecting for a link.

Approach 2 to thematic link building:

1. Analyze the objective, theme and content of the website for which link building is being done (parent website).
2. Visit Google search engine & using the "related" command, search for sites that are related to the parent website. (E.g. related: www.yourdomain.com). This would show the websites that are thematically relevant to that of the parent website Note that most of these websites would be direct business competitors to the parent website.
3. Collate these details in a spreadsheet.
4. Approach every website that is not a direct business competitor with the possible resource inclusion option.
5. If they are direct business competitors then visit siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com & enter these domains one by one
6. Goto the "inlinks" tab & select the option "Entire Website" & "Except from this domain"
7. This will show the external links to the shortlisted website
8. Save this using the "download TSV" option on siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
9. Approach these websites with the possible resource inclusion option.
10. Note that after step no. 5 you can also use the "link" command on Google e.g. link: www.prospectivedomain.com, this would provide lesser number of results OR you can use the website www.LinkPopularity.com for analyzing the backlinks of the shortlisted websites for Google, Yahoo & MSN.
11. After step no. 10, visit every website one by one for understanding the relevance & theme of the website and then proceed to step no. 11.

The two approaches mentioned above are not mutually exclusive and you can mix-and-match the steps to get optimal results.

We would also recommend that you also actively pursue "one-to-many" link building strategies such as press release distribution or content/ functionality syndication, viral marketing that are scalable are likely to yield faster results with link building.


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