Just wrote a short blurb on my other blog that deals with online marketing.
An eyetracking study has been done that followed how people actually view your website. The images posted are more than just eyeopening. They show you how to layout a website and in what order for real, human, visitors.
Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.
Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been adopted by all the major search engines. There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site.
1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and
2. The Robots Tag
The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)
This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content. The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots Tag.
Creating your robots.txt file
Example 1 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing. The robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable for indexing.
Example 2 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq, cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will now not be indexed by any search engine spiders.
Example 3 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin, images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation
By naming the particular search spider in the “User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by Google.
That’s all there is to it!
As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be difficult to implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and the robots tag.
The Robots Tag
This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do with site content appears in the section of a web page. A simple example would be as follows;
In this example we are telling all search engines not to index the page or to follow any of the links contained within the page. In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page, because the site contains time sensitive information. This can be achieved simply by adding the “noarchive” directive.
What could be simpler!
Although there are other ways of preventing duplicate content from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt file and or a Robot tag combination.
Source: ArticlesFactory.com
Should you require further information about our search engine marketing or optimization services please visit us at http://www.e-prominence.co.uk – The specialist search marketing company.
10 Tips On Promoting Your New Blog
One great way of getting more traffic and more importantly, making the traffic come back to your site over and over again, is by having your own blog.
The term, ‘Blog‘, is becoming more and more popular, and these days most online companies have a blog.
How can you promote your blog? Once you get your blog known, if you have good enough content, then it will promote itself, thats the amazing thing with blogs.
Heres some quick tips to help promote your blog.
1. Allow your blog readers to subscribe to your own RSS feed. Subscribe with Feedburner. Feedburner allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers.
2. Always set your blog to ping ‘update services’. What is that? If you use the Wordpress software, here is a great explanation, http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services.
3. Take full advantage of Technorati. For a full explanation of what Technorati is and how it works, take a look here, http://www.technorati.com/about/tour.html.
4. Use the power of social netwroking sites, such as digg.com, reddit.com and del.icio.us . If you write a great article, submit it to these sites, if they get picked up by them, you will see a massive increase in traffic to your blog.
5. When writing a post, always make sure you link to as many related sites and blogs. Many blogs have a ‘trackback’ feature enabled which can see what other blogs, like yours, are sending visitors to their blogs. They then usually link back to your blog automatically for free.
6. Get your blogs web address in as many places as possible. Use forums, and put your blogs address in your signature.
7. Submit your blog to as many blog directories as possible, such as blogcatalog.com
8. Link to your blog from your websites homepage, and also in the footer of every other page on your website.
9. Get tips from 2 pro bloggers, such as problogger.net and shoemoney.com
10. Finally, and most important, write great content that is relevant to your website, and you will then find your readers will do your promoting for you.
Article Written By Phil From www.adquick.co.uk - Please check out AdQuick
So you’ve started a blog, and now its time to get the word out there. But where? How? Does it cost?
To answer that question, you can spend many sleepless nights Googling and reading, trying to make sense of the online blogging world. What do words like RSS, Feeds, XML, pinging, wordpess and other geek-speak mean?
We hope to answer some of these questions through articles and blog entries we at The Blog Resource share with you through this blog.
Getting started promoting your blog? Start by submitting your site here first. Make sure you follow our submission and promotion tips to ensure your blog gets listed.
To your success!
- Ed Loveless
Webmaster of TheBlogResource