What is robots.txt and how to use it? at 01:59

Everyone likes when their webpages are indexed properly but noone actually cares about the importance of robots.txt! Let us dig deep and find out why its so important when it comes to SEO.

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file that is used to exclude content from the crawling process of search engine spiders / bots. Robots.txt is also called the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Why to use robots.txt?

In general, we prefer that our webpages are indexed by the search engines. But there may be some content that we don’t want to be crawled & indexed. Like the personal images folder, website administration folder, customer’s test folder of a web developer, no search value folders like cgi-bin, and many more. The main idea is we don’t want them to be indexed.

Is robots.txt file a certain solution?

No. Standards based bots like Google’s, Yahoo’s or other big search engine’s robots listen to your robots.txt file. This is because they are programmed to. If configured so, any search engine bot can ignore the robots.txt file. Result: there is no guarantee.

How to use robot.txt file?

Robots.txt file has some simple directives which manages the bots. These are:

User-agent: this parameter defines, for which bots the next parameters will be valid. * is a wildcard which means all bots or Googlebot for Google.

Disallow: defines which folders or files will be excluded. None means nothing will be excluded, / means everything will be excluded or /folder name/ or /filename can be used to specify the values to excluded. Folder name between slashes like /folder name/ means that only folder name/default.html will be excluded. Using 1 slash like /folder name means all content inside the folder name folder will be excluded.

There are also some other parameters which are only supported by all browsers. 

These are:

Allow: this parameter works just the opposite of Disallow. You can mention which content will be allowed to be crawled here. * is a wildcard.

Request-rate: defines pages/seconds to be crawled ratio. 1/20 would be 1 page in every 20 second.

Crawl-delay: defines howmany seconds to wait after each succesful crawling.

Visit-time: you can define between which hours you want your pages to be crawled. Example usage is: 0100-0330 which means that pages will be indexed between 01:00 AM - 03:30 AM GMT.

Sitemap: this is the parameter where you can show where your sitemap file is. You must use the complete URL addres for the file.

Robots.txt example:

User-agent: * #allows all search engine spiders.

Disallow: /secretcontent/ #disallow them to crawl content folder.

Resources:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360

http://www.robotstxt.org/

All that matters is a Good Design! at 01:16

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute "quick fix", you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the "salesperson dressed shabbily" analogy, and you will get my point.

Try to make your website as professional as you can. Usage of proper language is also important when you are writing content or you are interacting with your customer. Correct business etiquettes plays an important role during interaction. You should also take good care while sending mails to your customers regarding any information or any new product. Your mail should be small, crisp and error free. If any customer is mailing you about any query, dont be late to reply. Customers tend forget if you dont keep in touch with them which will result in lose prospective customers.

Its time for Search Engine Friendly Pages for your website at 00:49

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it. Creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query. The tips in this article are the pre-requisites for any website aspiring the top positions in Google, Yahoo, and the other engines.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically. But if you want to provide interactive information, you should have the content in textual as well as flash movies, images, audio, etc.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. Choose meta tags very carefully. They should be targeted towards your website's content. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load. Always validate your html code. Check your code before launching your website for any syntax errors, spelling errors. If you find it difficult to check errors manually, go for html code validators like Dreamweaver and W3C Validation service where will get all the errors. So before launching your site in the web just run the code in any html validator.

Give your visitors a reason to buy from your site.... at 13:51

Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you're making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don't know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won't buy if they find the process cumbersome or hectic. 

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear and  concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site. 

Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via PayPal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won't be able to pay you when they want to. 

On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL Certificates for this. It's better if you can provide a secured server to carry out transactions. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. 

How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing? You can provide them with support by sending all the buyers an email with all support details. Else you can add you email address to each page so that customers cab contact you immediately if they have any query whether it may be sales or support.

Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, customer feedback, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet. 

As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits and hence increasing your credibility.

Aren't Sitemaps important to you? at 13:03

A sitemap is often considered unimportant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they will always have the choice to refer to your sitemap to know where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

Conveying your site's theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the total overview of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page. By doing that you will be saving your visitors' time and they will get easy access to every page of your site.

Optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contain links to every single page on your site. It creates a hierarchy of how your site is arranged. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site's structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

A simple Mailing List can do wonders for your business! at 10:56

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage, "the money is in the list", cannot be true enough -- if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects. 

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let's take a look at a very good example -- apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via  iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a "heavyweight" download such as a full-featured software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it. 

However, slapping togather a simple download and putting a link on your website won't be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you. 

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you'll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the hard disk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

Always keep track of the database and the visitors informed regarding the new features that you add to your site and the their advantages so that the visitors can find interest in your site. This will increase the percentage of the visitors who turns into your prospects.

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Optimize your web images for faster loading rich websites... at 01:24

There is a great difference between print and web image optimization. While the emphasis on a print optimized photo remains in its colour depth and vividness with no bar on the size of the image, web optimized images need to be small in size and big on impact. Web optimized image should have good balance between Quality, Resolution and File size of the image. Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dial up connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dial up users is the loading time of your website. 

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dial up connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site. 

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance. For this you don't have to go for high definition image editors. To start off you can use the available freewares that are used for image editing.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size. The more accurately you can optimize your image the less time it will take to load your page.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

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