Creating A Robots.txt File
June 29, 2008 SEO No CommentsCreating A Robots.txt File
Robots Exclusion Standard
A robots.txt file, commonly mis-represented as a robot.txt file, is a file encoded in
the ANSI text format. This basically means it is a simple text file which should be created
in Notepad. It controls how search engine crawlers (robots) look at your website and can be
used to specify how certain areas of your site is indexed or to give instruction to specific
search engines.
The file should be placed in the root directory of your website of where your index.html or
home page resides. Even though you may not require the spider to exclude any area of your
site from its search you should still have it as all the top-ranked search engines now look
for it.
Some reasons you may need to exclude spiders from your site include:
1. There are some private directories or information that you do not want to be crawled.
2. You’re still fixing parts of the site and some areas may contain error pages.
3. You have optimized certain pages for specific search engines and want to exclude other
search engine spiders from indexing it.
4. You want to prevent some search engine robots or email harvesting bots (Bad Bots)
from crawling your pages altogether.
Syntax For File Creation
The basic instructions are placed in two lines of text.
User-agent: Spider Name
Disallow: File/Directory Name
Let’s look at some examples:
1. If you want to allow every spider to index everything on your site.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
An asterisk “*” is used to represent all search engine spiders while the second disallow line
is left blank.
2. If you want NO spider to index anything on your website.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This may be useful when you’re just starting to fix your entire site. Remember to change it
back once the site is active.
3. If you want to prevent all the bots from searching a specific section of your site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /specificsection/
The forward slash is placed at the beginning and end of the directory name to allow
NO part of that file from being crawled.
So, if you were disallowing a certain page from that directory for all the search engines
User-agent: *
Disallow: /specificsection/private1.html
4. Finally you can prevent specific robots from crawling your sites. Some examples of them are:
Google- Googlebot
MSN- MSNBot
AltaVista- Scooter
ASk/Teoma- ASkJeeves
Inktomi/HotBot- Inktomi Slurp
Google even has a separate bot for indexing images on your website called Googlebot-Image.
Make sure if you are disallowing a specific bot from your site page that you place them first
in the text document.
Most people prevent bots from indexing their cgi-bin files, private files, images and newly
constucted pages. A common robots.txt file might look like this
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /newarticles/
Disallow: /images/
Alternatives
HTML meta tags can also be used to prevent robots from crawling certain pages. The html code
can be placed in the HEAD section of an html document to exclude the page from the search engine
index and not to follow any links on this page for further possible indexing.
Joneil Alcock is the webmaster of AddTrafficNow
which is a site dedicated to search engine optimization and website promotion. Get
useful products and tools at his Internet
Marketing Centre
Joneil Alcock is the webmaster of <a href="http://www.addtrafficnow.com">AddTrafficNow</a> which is a site dedicated to search engine optimization and website promotion. Get useful products and tools at his <a href="http://www.optimize.addtrafficnow.com">Internet Marketing Centre</a>
Efficient Offshore Search Engine Optimization services
The term consultancy is designated to the practice of extending assistance in terms of expertise to any company for promoting or enhancing its performance, while the agencies specializing in offering such services could be known as the Consultants. Like in any line of business there are many such Consultants eagerly offering their expert services, similarly in regards to the SEO ” Search Engine Optimization India too some renowned Consultants offer their services, but sitting at very long distances across the seas who could be terms as the Offshore SEO Consultants. The consultancy is usually initiated through analysis of the existing business hurdles by the consultant with his expertise and experience and assesses that how the business process could improve the scope of particular business, and thereby make possible improvements. The terms of such an SEO Services varies from party to party and deal to deal basis. In all, the consultant normally offers the need based consultancy services to his clients for assisting them enhance and speed up their profitability by his expert consulting services. There are many professional Offshore SEO Consultancies that regularly offer their services to the clients from all over the world. Usually such consultants offer almost everything like complete range of software and information technology requirements. The experienced and expert consultants generally offer the overview of how the existing business of his client could grow and develop easily yet positively with the help of process and application developments. In order to build the long term rapport with his client, the consultant would offer all the necessary strategic solutions and relevant resources for the faster growth of the client s present business. As per the available studies, the average Offshore SEO Consultancy service providers of consultants have categorized their services. India is quick emerging as a winner in search engine optimization outsourcing services hype with almost 82% of the US based companies ranking India to be their first choice as an offshore outsourcing destination for e-commerce, web designing, web development and search engine optimization work. Being a talent rich country, India has all the right resources, infrastructure and facilities to stand apart from the crowd as one of the best offshore destinations to outsource services.
Searchrankpros: services: <a href="http://www.searchrankpros.org/link-building/directory-submission/directory-submission-services.html"> directory submission </a> services, link exchange services, article submission services, pay per click management service and <a href="http://www.searchrankpros.org/social-media-optimization/social-book-marking-services.html"> social book marking </a> services since 2002.
Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue. At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about. You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name. Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and, phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other. The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site. Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format. To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings. Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula. To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps. Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page. If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website. Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
For more information visit <a target="_blank" href="http://seos.awardspace.com/">Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Information</a>
To Get Super Traffic, Get more backlinks Posted By : David Freitag
5 ways to get more backlinks. Use these methods to supercharge your traffic.

