Simple, Frequently Forgotten SEO Tips
By Richard V. Burckhardt
It's easy to forget these simple, yet frequently overlooked SEO tips.
Create a robots.txt file. This is a simple text file telling the spiders what they can crawl. Assuming you want the entire site spidered, it’s as easy as typing this into Notepad and saving it as robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Drop it in the root of your site. Without a robots.txt, Google reports an error when trying to access the non-existent file. This will take care of that.
Naturally, the robots.txt is much more powerful that this, but so many sites flat out don’t have one at all. More on the many uses of robots.txt can be found at http://www.robotstxt.org/.
Get local. If you haven’t already, register your site in Google Local Business Center at http://www.google.com/local/add. It’s free and gives your site the opportunity to possibly show up in local business results listings in Google search (like the map area below).
Sign up for the Bing version as well at https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx.
Customize the 404 page. This is the page that appears when someone tries to go to a non-existent page on a domain. You can currently find it by trying to get to any page on your site that you know doesn’t exist. Instead of a scary Server Error (insert blood curdling scream here) default 404 page appearing, create a sitemap page with a directory of your pages. Link to this in your footer as your Sitemap and use a non-spidered copy as your 404 page (Frequently this can be done in your web hosting control panel or by uploading a 404.html page). This will help keep visitors on your site by giving them a chance to find what they are looking for and it also creates a table of contents for the search engine spiders to follow.
You’d be surprised how many great sites I have come across that somehow missed these, so here’s a quick reminder!
Read the Spanish translation: Tips de SEO, simples, y frecuentemente olvidados
This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.
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LOL, so many people don’t know about the robots file. I work with a lot of web designers that have no idea what I and talking about when I mention it. hopefully they find your blog.
Richard, first time visitor to your site…love the suggestions. As you mention in another post, the robots.txt is a picky little beast. It is important for people to know what they are doing so they do not inadvertently tell the bots NOT to visit!
.-= Richard Cummings´s last blog ..SEO: Keyword Competitive Analysis =-.