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Loading ...SEO Tutorial Part-3
Introduction
So it’s 1:44 am in the morning, I should be asleep by now but I have this urge to keep on writing and I can’t stop, so I’ll keep on going with the tutorial even though I just finished writing Part 2, in that edition we talked about Wordpress and its themes and plugins and how to download them, but We are now at the 3rd edition of the SEO Tutorial Series. In this edition I will talk about Robots.txt, choosing keywords, and last but not least getting your site known.
Robots.txt
-Importance of a robots.txt file
Robots.txt is the txt file that all websites have, well at least all the websites that appear on search engines. Robots.txt tells the Web Robots (Spiders, Crawlers etc.) where they can go, and where they can’t go. Web robots are mostly used by Search Engines like Google, to index websites but since Google penalizes your website for having duplicate content, so you have to tell the Google Robot where it can and where it can’t go in order to avoid your site to have duplicate content.
Fact about robots
Robots are used by spammers and hackers and people of that sort to steal private information from your website, but sometimes they can’t go in if you set up a permission in your Robots.txt or in a robots meta tag. So the best way to do it would be to add permissions on the files.
Robots.txt is a file that you can create in the root folder of your site. The root folder, is anything after the public_html folder. Before I keep on telling you about robots.txt and confuse you, I’ll talk about when I used to have trouble with robots.txt because when I saw that you needed to code in order to make a robots.txt file I became dismayed seeing as I have way too many things to do, and learning another language is not one of my priorities right now, but after looking over at different websites that talked about this particular subject I noticed that learning it is not very difficult, it can actually be done in less than an hour, and you don’t even need to learn it completely you just need to learn the codes that apply to your site.
Since there are a lot of different codes to making a robots.txt file, I will go over the most used ones, I will also post the code as an example.
-How to stop a robot from visiting URLs starting with “/movies/cars/ “, “/yellow/ “,”/monkey.html” and “/seo.php”.
Imagine that the folder “Movies/car”, folder “yellow” and files “monkey.html, and seo.php” of your site contained private information of your site and you don’t want others to know about it, especially robots, you would use the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /movies/cars/
Disallow: /yellow/
Disallow: /monkey.html
Disallow: /seo.php
-How to block one robot and allow the other robot, as you can see, Googlebot-Image is allowed, while the other robots are not allowed:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
-How to add a Sitemap to a robots.txt file
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
-An example of a robots.txt file from technorati’s website:
User-agent: NPBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /
User-Agent: sitecheck.internetseer.com
Disallow: /
User-Agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 3
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /cosmos.php
How to block a bot from crawling certain file types:
Very often, a search engine will look at various files in your website directory and ends up finding “duplicate” content, such as files if you wanted to block certain files you would use the “*” and “$” symbols to block bots from crawling those file types.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.gif$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.jpb$
Disallow: /*.html$
I hope those codes helped you, but always be careful when editing your robots.txt as you might end up blocking pages that you do not want blocked, and remember to always check for errors twice.
Choosing Keywords
-Importance of Keywords
Keywords play a very important factor with SEO, like I said before without keywords it would be very hard for a person to find your website in a search engine as well as it would be hard for a search engine to know what your site’s keywords are if you don’t tell them.
Specifying a keyword is very easy, the hard thing is finding a keyword that you can use and a keyword that is profitable, but in this tutorial I will try to make it as easy as possible.
The first thing you need to do is find your niche, which means find the thing that your blog revolves around because you can’t have a website that’s supposed to be about cars talking about clouds and monkeys, you need to focus on the things your site revolves around.
A good way to find a niche is to look for things that people need, find a demand of a product and use that as your niche, for example, find something that your friends might be interested in, or things that people as a whole might be interested in.
The best thing about writing is to write about something that YOU like, something that really interests you, because if you just write about something to gain a profit then your content won’t be as interesting as if you were writing something that you have a passion for.
Now that you have decided what you want to write about, it’s time for you to decide what your keyword is gonna be, and the way to do that is to use a “Keyword Research Tool”, when using a Keyword Research tool make sure you do the following:
- Use Generic keywords, if your website is about selling cars then try to make your keywords “cars, buy car, buy car online, etc.” always remember to think like your clients think, step in to their shoes and research what they are looking for and what they need.
- Search what keywords your competition is using, and build search terms around it. I’m not telling you to go ahead and steal your competition’s keywords, I’m telling you to make the keywords that they have better. For example if your competition has a keyword called “buy a car online” you can make their keyword “buy cars online”
- Don’t add too many keywords because you might get penalized by search engines, as a maximum add about 10 keywords or else a search engine will penalize you for keyword stuffing. Besides, there is no need for you to add many keywords when you can simply add good keywords that will work just as well as having 20 keywords.
Now that you know the Dos and Donts of keywords you can go ahead and search for them.
Finding keywords is fairly easy. Simply go to google’s keyword research tool type in your niche and it will find keywords for your website. If you want more accurate results, sign up with them and they’ll give you more accurate results that you can use as your keywords.
To add keywords you simply need to make a meta tag in the header of your html file, I will post an example of meta tags that you can edit and make your own.
(head)
(title)The title of my site(/title)
(meta name="description" content="All about SEO.")
(meta name="keywords" content="SEO, SEO site, SEO help")
(/head)