One thing is to get to the top but to stay there is another. To stay on top of search results you need to have an ongoing campaign so it is very important to find firm that offers cheap SEO services for small businesses that are on the budget. What this means is that if you have certain marketing budget and you spend it all on company to optimize your website, it will only bring results for a short period of time. Your website needs to continue it’s growth and link popularity to stay at the top and with search algorithms changing all the time in 2-3 months your website might falling again in natural search if you don’t have an ongoing SEO campaign that you can afford.

Getting an affordable SEO services is a smart start for small businesses and once you start getting targeted traffic, you should also be getting higher conversions and more sales to your business. By that point your SEO campaign is not only paying for itself but also bringing in the profits. Cheaper SEO service is a better option for new websites and businesses on the budget. Get some results first and make sure you can afford long term, ongoing campaign that will grow your website into an authority and bring better results in the long run.

Basically blogs first started out as a subscription style online journal for people to receive via email and later into their RSS feed readers. RSS feed is the format that allows your content to be delivered (and subscribed to) on the Web and an easy way to land your blog post in millions of people’s inboxes, and will possibly end up under bookmarks as well.

What’s really cool about RSS feeds subscriptions is that provides people with a wonderful array of blog posts daily without ever having to actually visit the blog itself. This means that one can grow a virtual subscriber base with one simple niche blog, and profit from the experience every time they make a post. Utilizing the power of blogging and RSS one can make some serious money by keeping people up to date with affiliate products, and services.

Since the RSS feed will deliver the blog to subscriber’s mailboxes, it makes sense to try to make some profit from such an advantageous situation. By offering affiliate products, one can provide their own affiliate link embedded into the blog for readers to click. Just don’t overdo or you might loose your subscribers, make sure there is a value (insight or personal honest review) in your posts as well.

A good example of setting up a blog for maximum RSS exposure is to write a blog post with hyperlinked keywords that are directly linked to your products or services. Make sure that the links are either live, or given actual URL’s in the actual post so that the user can stay within their own e-mail application while reading, and visiting the recommend site that you provide them with.

RSS feeds are a must do for anyone serious about getting online recognition and profiting off of blogs. Setting up the RSS feed is very simple and it is already setup on most blog platforms, which means it takes little or no time to do something that can help you in many ways. It can help your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Google and others spider and index rss feeds so your content gets picked up quickly.

A very popular way is to use free RSS service available from FeedBurner or any other such service. I personally use FeedBurner as it offers so many different options including email subscriptions, podcasts including feeds with video, making sure your feed works in any reader or browser and many more. FeedBurner is owned by Google so now you can also monetize your feed through their AdSense program.

So if you don’t have RSS feed setup on your blog or website, set one up or sign up with FeedBurner or similar service it will make big difference.

He talks about how img alt tags don’t help your rankings any more but I think you should still use them for accessibility reasons.

Keywords meta tags? He does not use them anymore on his websites as Google gives very little weight to them today if any at all but again other search engines still use them for the rankings so it really depends if you are optimizing your pages for Google only or for Yahoo, MSN, Ask and others. If you are optimizing for all engines then it doesn’t hurt to include keywords meta tags, Google might not look at them but certainly will not “punish” you for including it on your website.

He also thinks that keyword density analysis is a waste of time but instead does an intensive keyword research and spends most of the time on that in any search campaign. Another good point he makes is about importance of getting Quality Contextually Relevant Links versus less valued links acquired through “link farms” or any similar link exchange program. I have to agree that is better to get 10 Quality Links than 1000 crappy, non-related links.

Another great tip he gives is on meta description tag. Latest research shows that it is not so much used for higher ranking but more of a marketing space. The description tag is what will show below your website title on search results page so what you include in description is what might get people to click and come to your website, if it “grabs their attention”. So use description tag wisely.

Here’s the video:

What do you think? Comment below.

I’ve just gone through what has to be the most comprehensive course on traffic that’s out there (no it doesn’t cost $1000!) and let me tell you..

..most of us are probably only using a tiny percentage of the available traffic methods that exist, it is mind blowing.

Sure - the time and tested ones are still effective but in the past year or so brand new methods have sprung up that you need to master.

If you don’t master multiple traffic methods you seriously risk getting left behind in the dust of your competitors. Traffic has moved on you know.

In fact, what you’re now dealing with is ‘Web Traffic 2.0′ - it’s an entirely different beast.

If you can start applying just one or two new traffic tactics (and this course makes it super
easy for you to do it as I’ll explain in a minute) then you could easily double your sales and income. (You can Download Free E-Book Here! - right click and save as or click on the link to view in browser.)

So who’s behind the course and why am I raving about it?

Well, it’s from Internet marketing expert Michael Cheney who has been online since 1995. What he doesn’t know about traffic is, quite honestly, not worth knowing I think.
Read this Traffic Interview

You might have heard of Michael’s AdSense Videos or his 11 Days To List Profits course.

Anyway, this time he’s really pulled out the stops and offered what I believe is the ultimate all-in-one traffic solution for you for three reasons;

#1. You get instant traffic as the package comes
with 100,000 ad credits to get you an immediate
influx of traffic

#2. You get 50 How-To videos that show you step-by-step
exactly how to get masses of traffic into your
website

#3. You get a tailored Fast-Track To Traffic
Action Plan that guides you every step of the way
to get masses of traffic into your website as
quickly as possible

So there you have it - if you want more traffic (who doesn’t?!) then you need to get your hands on these great videos and the instant traffic that comes with them.

You can Download Free Book Here! - right click and save as or click on the link to view in browser.

Check Out “Michael’s Traffic Videos”

Enjoy.

And now it is confirmed that the new Google Toolbar Beta officially hijacks your web browser when you go to a page that no longer exists and returns a 404 “Not Found” error. Matt Cutts and TechCrunch in their article confirmed the story.

From Matt Cutts:

404 errors with default error pages

When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor. If this is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs also listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools account.

If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. The content of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a missing page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the content they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

So this definitely means that it is very important to setup your own custom 404 pages and here’s some “must haves”:

WordPress themes already have 404 page template but you should simply add some more text like “something went wrong” or “That Page is Currently Unavailable” and add a link to the homepage and sitemap (if you have one) as this is the easiest way for your users to get out of the situation.

If you have a site search box. If you don’t have a site search and are your site is generating 404 errors frequently, perhaps you should get one. You can even put one from Google that will search your site and the web.

You should avoid putting all your standard site navigation on this page as you should aim to remove any distractions. In wordpress 404 page template just remove script that includes sidebar (<?php get_sidebar(); ?>).

Anything extra you add to your 404 page (besides standard”Page Not Found”) it just might help keeping your visitor on your site longer and possibly not lose that sale after all.

Here’s a good example of 404 page from Alistapart.com : Click Here!

Related links

• Creating a Custom 404 Error Page (4 Guys From Rolla)
• Creating Custom Error Messages in Apache (4WebHelp)

Do you support Google’s stance in hijacking pages? What do you think?

Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks or longer to get a new domain indexed by Google. When I build a new site In order to speed up the process of getting your site indexed faster, in 24 hours or less, follow the steps below as it is what I do and it works every time:

1) Create your website 5 pages minimum

Build your pages, optimize titles and meta tags accordingly (use our Top 8 Free SEO tips for optimizing your website) and don’t use the “under construction” page. Pages you write should have at least a few paragraphs of real content.

2) Create deep Internal Linking

Use a template with a menu structure to put your pages in. Link to your pages through the menu and if possible within the text in the pages as well.

3) Put links on your existing websites or blogs

If you have websites (especially BLOGS) that are already in Google’s index put a link to your new site from those websites. This works really well for me. If the sites are niche related even better but for the sole purpose of indexing relevancy is really not that critical. If you do have a blog and you should (you can get one for free at WordPress.com, Blogger.com, etc) than besides putting a link, write a post about it and place a link in the content to your new website.

Here’s the cool thing about blogs, if you have WordPress setup to ping Google or another ping service that in turn pings Google, the blog post will be spidered usually within a few minutes. So if you don’t have a blog, go get one!

4) Add to Social Bookmarking Sites

Put AddThis button on your site and add your new site yourself to few social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon.com, and Furl (first you have to get free account). One that I find very useful is actually Google himself, if you click on the AddThis button on this site you’ll see bunch of social sites you can bookmark but note the “Google Bookmarks” one. This is important one, submit it there first.

5) Submit site to Search engines

I have been using submitexpress.com to submit my site to major search engines and have good results with it. I know some SEO’s don’t recommend using automated submissions but I have never had any problems using submitexpress and their free service.

There you have it, these 5 steps gets my new websites indexed in Google and other Search engines anywhere from 3 hours to 24 hours max. The suggestions below I found not to be necessary but can only help.

Comment on popular and other blogs

Find 5 blogs that are fairly popular, relevant to your site, and have a recent blog post (last day or two) preferably DoFollow blogs. Read the post and add a comment that contributes to the discussion, including a link to your site in the URL field.

Create, Submit, and Ping your XML Sitemap

You can create a free XML sitemap here then upload the file to your site (just save it as sitemap.xml). Then ping Google with your sitemap by typing in the following URL in your browser, replacing the domain name with your own:

http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Next, create an account with Google Webmaster Central, add your site, and submit your XML sitemap.

Run some Google Adwords Ads

Create an account with Google Adwords and start running some ads, even if its just for the domain name, company name, or some long tail keywords. Google has to go to your site because of their quality score, which includes “your landing page quality”. Just spend a couple of bucks and it can help jumpstart the indexing.

You can also run a Press release.

With these steps, you should see your site indexed fairly quickly. I can’t guarantee the 24 hours, but it is possible. At the very least it will speed up the indexing significantly (from weeks to days). Look for the “googlebot” to visit in your site analytics. Then look for your site to show up with Google by doing a search with the site: operator (for example, site:sphinn.com). Enjoy!

What steps do you take to get your New site indexed as fast as possible?

Here’s tutorial on how you can use frames on your website for search engine optimization benefits when you need to hide something from Search engines but you still want your visitors to see it.

Never thought that I could use frames on a webpage as an SEO tactic. I probably would have never even tried it but my recent project has shown me that it is not just possible but it is a good option in certain situations. I had one of those exceptional situations recently so I decided to share.

Most SEO’s will agree that using frames is not a SEO friendly option for your site since Search engine Crawlers will have trouble getting through to the content in the file that is being included by frame script. In my case, there was no real content in the included file, I just wanted to add fancy table that will have links to my landing pages (categorized sale pages) on top of the home page so visitors would have easy and immediate access to them as they arrived to my site, so in this case that worked to my advantage. You see I have the same links in my footer and within the content so using frame I eliminated “extra” links on the page (for search engines) and added sort of quick links for my visitors.

Below the frame script it’s the “real” content, “search engine food” that is readable and indexable by robots. When spider comes to my page it will skip the frame and go directly to the important stuff - content.

Another place I realized I could use frames to my advantage is blocks of affiliate banners and links, like in a sidebar for example, since I already use “nofollow” tags on my affiliate links I thought why not just make it invisible to engines completely. I did a little test on one of my sites in the sidebar and just looking at the source I think it will be better because it has reduced the amount of “script” in the page’s code itself. I wanted visitors to see affiliate banners and links before other stuff (like recent posts, categories,…) but at the same time search engines will see it the same way so by putting affiliate banners and links into frame I have solved that issue.

Here’s another example: Let’s say you have this cool logo you worked on for hours and want to display it at the top of your pages with affiliate banner next to it but that image and affiliate link will end up in front of all the important header tags and content. You could use frame to display image and the link and that way the first thing robot will see is h1 tag and content below (if you have setup your page with h1 tag), skipping all the fancy stuff that search engines don’t really care about.

You see the easier and simpler we make for search engine to read our pages, the better off we’ll be. If the crawler has to go through a lot of script and links to get to the content than it might not index your page completely and correctly and that is something we don’t want.

Here are the steps to do this.

1. Create an html file with what ever you want to display (affiliate banners, links,etc.) , here’s an example of my topnav.html file that displays my top links, header image and the banner (note: I had to comment out the code so it doesn’t show up in the post):

<!– (example code begin - comment out copy everything below)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”LINK TO YOUR CSS STYLESHEET“>
</head>
<body>
<div class=”navigation”>
<ul>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/” target=”_parent”>Home</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/archives/” target=”_parent”>Archives</a></li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/free-seo-and-keyword-tools/” target=”_parent”>SEO Tools</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/seo-forums/” target=”_parent”>SEO Forums</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr-jobs.jobamatic.com/” target=”_parent”>JOB Board</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/downloads/” target=”_parent”>Downloads</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/seojrcom-sitemap/” target=”_parent”>SiteMap</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/link-with-us/” target=”_parent”>Link With Us</a> </li>
<li> <a href=”http://seojr.com/contact/” target=”_parent”>Contact</a> </li>

</ul>

</div>
<div id=”header”>
<div id=”logo”><a href=”http://seojr.com/” target=”_parent”></a></div>
<div id=”logo_ad”>
<a href=”http://www.seobook.com” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”><img border=”0″ src=”http://www.seobook.com/rf/banners/468-60.gif” width=”468″ height=”60″></a>

</div>
</div>

</body>
</html>

(example code end - comment out copy everything above)–>

Replace urls with your own or add whatever you want in it and upload the file to your server. Now you need to put the frame code on your website where you want your html file to be displayed.

Here’s an example of iframe script code (note: I had to comment out the code so it doesn’t show up in the post):

<!– (example code begin - comment out copy everything below)

<iframe src=”REPLACE THIS WITH URL TO your FILE” frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” height=”125px” width=”960px”></iframe>

(example code end - comment out copy everything above)—>

IMPORTANT NOTES: You need to set the height and width of frame to be displayed. If you are only including affiliate banner and you know it is 468×60 that set frame width and height to 468×60. Play with those numbers to get the result you want.

Also it is very important to use either target=”_blank” (open in new window) or target=”_parent” (open in same window) in every link or they will open inside the frame and if your frame is only 125px tall (like in my example) than users won’t see much of the page they clicked to go to.

I hope this article will help you if you find yourself in similar situation where you want visitors to see something but not search engines. If you have any questions about using frames or want to share another way of using frames for SEO, feel free to leave a comment below.

Here is the video:

Was this SEO training video helpful? Do you have a video you’d like to share? post a link in the comments!

If you did not know, Google every year puts out a year-end Zeitgeist report outlining the top searches and rising searches from billions of search queries. They have just just released the data for the year 2007. It’s kind of interesting to see what people are searching for and how it changes from year to year.

Here’s the top 10 rising searches and top 10 Fastest falling on Google for 2007:

Their showbiz search data is also kind of fun–it shows how most watched, most downloaded, and most enjoyed search queries for celebs correspond with their other news, events, and offline publicity .

You can see the rest of the Zeitgeist data list for 2007 and if you want to look at the previous years check out Zeitgeist Archive .

I wish you all happy and prosperous New 2008.

We all know what influence links have on your website PR and overall rank in search engines. Way before importance of Page Rank and link manipulation started webmasters will get links for different reasons like to get traffic from that site or for endorsements but no one was really thinking about getting organic search engine traffic by manipulating links.

As we realized the importance of links and what they can do for our websites more manipulative linking started with Link Networks, “unrelated” Reciprocal linking, Paid Linking,… And that did work for a while but Google and other engines have been cracking down on these automated link creation programs and link farms.

So how do you create a white hat link, the one that appears to be natural and Google will give it’s vote to? The answer is simple, just ask your self “will this link help my reader get more value?” and “would I create this link even if search engines did not exist?”. If you answer yes to these two questions, than search engines are more than likely count that link.

Watch this video by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMOZ.org that explains this theory little more, like they say “picture is worth thousands words”.

How do you look at links and creating them?

Watch the video below.

Was this SEO training video helpful? Do you have a video you’d like to share?

Since than I did get paid for all my posts I blogged and tried several other services. Some get paid to blog services were not so simple and easy to get in and actually get assignments like the two that I’m sticking with now.

The one that I used for a while now and successfully got paid from is described in previous post on blogging for money but this new service I’m trying now is Smorty and it seems like it will be another good way to get paid for blogging.

It took couple of days to get my blog approved but once that was done I logged in to my control panel just to find 4 opportunities waiting for me to accept if I wanted to. The interface is very cool looking and really easy to use. What I like about it is that you don’t have to go and search for assignments, they wait for you in your dashboard with descriptions and payment offer.

Another good thing about blogging for money with Smorty is having no limit on how much you can earn by takeing on as many tasks as you can handle, as long as you have completed assignments correctly within the 72 hr. time frame.

At the same time they have opportunities for Advertisers to advertise on blogs but I use it right now to make some money with my blogs.

So if you want to get started on get paid for blogging highway, get started with Smorty
I think you’ll like getting payed for all your efforts and finally monetizing your blog.

Join the forum discussion on this post

I’ve been downloading free PLR content for a long time now to try to make money with it or just to use it for content on my websites. I have a hard drive full of ebooks, software, scripts and articles but most of that content has already been published and is nothing new. Read on to find out about new site I discovered that has tons of fresh and usable PLR content and it is free to download.

You know to really succeed with your internet marketing career, you need to have great digital products that convert all of your qualified leads into real, cash-paying customers. Selling your own products is without a doubt the best way to make money online but for many people (including me), coming up with products will involve them creating them on their own, or it may involve them hiring other professionals to do the hard work for them.

Smart marketers learned a long time ago that leveraging someone else’s hard work is a much better way to go!

I’m pretty sure, like me, you’re always looking for ways to save time and money on your internet marketing business. I’ll easily spend hours each week just reading up on the latest internet marketing happenings and news, in the endless search of improving the way I do business. In my latest search, I came across a really unique website, that’s well worth you checking out if you are serious about time and money saving:

Go to Free PLR content Downloads!

The really wonderful thing about this site though is that membership is free. You can sign up as a VIP Member, which won’t cost you a cent, and you can download a huge amount of PLR material for free!

You can sell that material yourself as part of your own internet marketing business, and of course, you can change any part of the product to suit your target audience.

Don’t be put off by the free part either, in terms of the quality of the material that’s on offer, because I’ve downloaded the free PLR stuff myself and it’s of a really high quality.

I’ve paid plenty of writers in my time to create digital products, and I can honestly say that the quality of this material is just as good, if not better – without me having to pay the money I would pay a writer.

In addition to the free PLR material you can download as VIP Member, you can also access heaps of great information about how to improve your internet marketing business.

So, please do yourself a favor and join now – this is a Free Membership site that’s definitely worth your time regardless of your level of experience in internet marketing.

Get your Free PLR content Membership!

I promise you won’t be disappointed. Enjoy!

How do you get “one-way” links? You can buy those kind of links if you have money, you can use Free Article Submitter and submit articles to article directories and that is free but that requires you to write the articles first (or pay freelancer to do it for you). Both of these require either money or your precious time.

Or you can join the new text Link Revolution at tnx.com where you can get tons of non-reciprocal links from thousands of relevant websites and free text link ads. TNX is a new text link advertising platform aimed at both publishers and advertisers.

Joining TNX is free and it is very simple process with only the most basic information that is required at sign up.

Once you’re logged in, you come to the main dashboard, which is really nicely designed
and very easy to use and it is where you
control all campaigns
as a publisher or an advertiser.

The main advantage for webmasters is that they can sell links on every page of their websites, instead of just the main page.

This could be up to 10 times more profitable than selling sitewide links.

Also webmaster can choose only relevant ads to be displayed.

The main advantage for advertisers is the cheap price, and also the ability to promote hundreds of different keywords.

And you don’t even have to input all keywords manually - they can be imported automatically from text Notepad or Excel file(txt or csv).

Here are some interesting notes from the site :

• Links are not served on pages which are not trafficked, so publishers cannot charge for links on their sites for pages which are hidden and not served.
• TNX pushes publishers to serve ads in noticeable areas of the sites : “they are useful for the visitor and are not meant only for search bots”
• TNX says it does not know of a “single case when participation in our system would do any harm to any of our partners.”
• Since currency is not used, TNX makes it easy to buy links on sites which are based in other countries, without dependency on Paypal or other checkout systems.
• If TNX is based on a points system, is it buying links?
• TNX has over 25,000 different users (advertisers and publishers) with over 27 Million links in their system, with over 15,000 new links created by the hour on over 17 million different web pages.
• Links are purchased and maintained on a monthly basis, so you’re essentially renting the link.
• SEO Consultants & Agencies get a discount.

They also have affiliate program for webmasters where you will earn 13.3% of all “TNX-points”, he/she will earn in the future (a reward for referring an advertiser is also available) when you bring a new webmaster to the TNX system. What is cool about it is that you can either use points to advertise your own websites to improve traffic and search engine rating or sell them to the TNX system for cash.

Sign up for free account and see for your self all the advantages of TNX System.

• Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.
• Offers rough suggested monthly search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
• Links the search volumes to the related global search results.
• Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool shows the necessary bid to rank #1 for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price and ad position.
• Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, and Keyword Discovery keyword research results.
• Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.

Are you using SEOBook?

London is home to numerous historical and modern attractions, from the London Eye to the National Gallery and Tower of London (Some other famous London tourist attractions are Tate Modern, British Museum, Natural Historical Museum, Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, St Paul�s cathedral and National Portrait gallery). With free admission to many top attractions, there’s no better place to soak up some culture and during celebrations like Christmas or New Year, some London hotels offers attractive discounts in their services.

Make sure you visit Edinburgh as well. Edinburgh is easily accessible by road, plane boat or train. Getting around in Edinburgh is just as easy. The local bus services makes all areas accessible. The city Edinburgh has a year round programs of festivals and events ranging from the world famous summer festivals to the worlds biggest New Year street party. Finding a good Edinburgh hotel shouldn’t be that hard either.

There is one more place you should visit while you are there, it is Glasgow. Christmas shopping in Glasgow is the most satisfying in Britain outside London. The City Center has some of the best pubs clubs restaurants and Glasgow hotels in Scotland and it is similar to that of Barcelona or any Large American city. Glasgow really is a city that has it all when it comes to nightlife. Whatever your choice of activity when the sun sets, Glasgow is sure not to disappoint.

Another topic Matt covers is Video Marketing; where to submit videos, how good Search Engines are in indexing video, what to do to have more chance of getting your video indexed. He suggests getting a transcript and putting some meta tags in description of the video for the best results.

Lastly, some great tips on indexing and website navigation. Having crawlable(not flash or java) navigation helps your website being indexed easier by Search engines.

Well all in all I think this is great resource with valuable tips, just think of it as Free SEO Video training and Enjoy. Here’s the video:

What do you think?

Join the forum discussion on this post

How can you improve your website’s crawlability for better Search Engine Optimization? There are many ways by optimizing your website to make easier for spiders to crawl and understand your page’s themes like using Robots Meta Tags but one easy and effective way is to tell bots what to index and what they should not by creating a Robots.txt file and placing it to your root folder.

Having a effective robots.txt file will help your blog to rank higher in Search Engines, receive higher paying relevant Ads, and can increase your blog traffic.

The robots.txt file will instruct search engine robots what pages on your blog or website should be crawled and indexed. Most websites (CMS, Wordpress, etc.) will have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) and you really don’t want them to crawl them because there is no relevant content on them so creating a simple robots.txt file can actually improve your website crawlability.

When I did search for indexed files on one of my websites had my style.css file and some admin files indexed which did not do me any good for SEO (to see how many and which files are indexed on your website you can use our free Index Checker Tool ).

Robots.txt samples

Here’s a simple robots.txt file if you use Wordpress:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/

“User-agent: *” means that all the search bots (from Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on) should use those instructions to crawl your website. You can use “User-agent: Googlebot” to instruct Google bot only.

“Disallow: /wp-” makes sure that the search engines will not crawl the Wordpress files. This line will exclude all files and foldes starting with “wp-” from the being indexed, avoiding duplicated content and admin files.

Here’s more comprehensive sample and available options for WP 2.+:

User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /about/
Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /contact
Disallow: /category/

User-agent: Googlebot
# disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.wmv$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$

# disallow all files with ? in url
Disallow: /*?*

# disable duggmirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

# allow google image bot to search all images
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# allow adsense bot on entire site
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

Click Here to see my Robots.txt file.
If you are not using Wordpress and want to improve your SEO just substitute the lines with files or folders on your website that you don’t want to be crawled, for example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /any other folder or file to be excluded/

A robots.txt can be created easily with Notepad. After you created the robots.txt file just upload it to your root directory and that’s it!

For best SEO in your robots.txt you should probably only disallow anything that you want a robot to completely ignore.

Using Robots Meta Tags

Stop all robots from indexing a page on your site, but still follow the links on the page

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

Allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Googles bots from indexing the page

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex,follow” />

Allow robots to index the page on your site but not to follow outgoing links

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

Google Sponsored Robots.txt Articles

1. Controlling how search engines access and index your website
2. The Robots Exclusion Protocol
3. robots.txt analysis tool
4. Googlebot
5. Inside Google Sitemaps: Using a robots.txt file
6. All About Googlebot

Do you use Robots.txt file for SEO? Maybe it is time to use it.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Having more comments on your blog gives your post’s more unique content and thus more “love” from Search Engines. But how do you encourage readers to post more comments on your blog? One good way is to use DoFollow plugin on your blog and join ‘U Comment - I Follow’ campaign.

‘U Comment - I Follow’ campaign was created to encourage more blog comments by letting readers know that you don’t use “Nofollow” tags in posted comments (which is default setting in WordPress Blog) so your readers comments will count towards their blog, links and ultimately Google Page Rank.

At the same time more comments will help your blogs listings as Google crawls it and finds more content updates and that will also encourage more user generated content.

So show your commenters that you appreciate them and spread the link love. Download “DoFollow” Wordpress plugin from Kimmo Suominen and join the “movement”!

If you are using Blogger, here’s how to implement Dofollow in blogger. Read this article http://indobloger.blogspot.com/2007/09/u-comment-i-follow-lets-readers-leave.html

Do you use DoFollow plugin? Have you joined yet?

Interesting video aired yesterday on WebProNews with Aaron Wall, the Author of SEO Book who talked about SEO tracking software. According to Aaron the software needs to have a way to track items such as analytics, page rankings, back links, and the number of indexed pages and here are his suggestions on which tools to use:

* Google Analytics
* Mint Site Tracking Software
* Digital Point Forums
* SEO for Firefox
* Compete.com
* SEO Digger

I did test the SEO Digger and seems very cool, Iwill probably do a comprehensive review of these SEO Tracking Softwares later. I personally like and use some other Free Tracking Software like Compete, StatCounter, Keyword Tracking, CrazyEgg and most Free SEO Tools here on Seojr.com . Watch the Video