Robots.txt file for seo

Your Robots.txt file is what tells the search engines which pages to access and index on your website on which pages not to. For example, if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your thank you page, that page won’t be able to show up in the search results and web users won’t be able to find it. Keeping the search engines from accessing certain pages on your site is essential for both the privacy of your site and for your SEO.  This article will explain why this is and provide you with the knowledge of how to set up a good Robots.txt file.

How Robots.txt Work

Search engines send out tiny programs called “spiders” or “robots” to search your site and bring information back to the search engines so that the pages of your site can be indexed in the search results and found by web users. Your Robots.txt file instructs these programs not to search pages on your site which you designate using a “disallow” command. For example, the following Robots.txt command:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /mypage
…would block all search engine robots from visiting the following page on your website:

http://www.yoursite.com/mypage

Notice that before the disallow command, you have the command:

User-agent: *

The “User-agent:” part specifies which robot you want to block and could also read as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot

This command would only block the Google robots, while other robots would still have access to the page:

http://www.yoursite.com/mypage

However, by using the “*” character, you’re specifying that the commands below it refer to all robots. Your robots.txt file would be located in the main directory of your site. For example:

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

Why Some Pages Need to Be Blocked

There are three reasons why you might want to block a page using the Robots.txt file. First, if you have a page on your site which is a duplicate of another page, you don’t want the robots to index it because that would result in duplicate content which can hurt your SEO. The second reason is if you have a page on your site which you don’t want users to be able to access unless they take a specific action.

List of some robot.txt

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /
User-agent: Twitterbot
Allow: /
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Allow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.html
Allow: /*.html$

In all of these cases, you’ll need to include a command in your Robots.txt file that tells the search engine spiders not to access that page, not to index it in search results and not to send visitors to it. Let’s look at how you can create a Robots.txt file that will make this possible.

Installing Your Robots.txt File

Once you have your Robots.txt file, you can upload it to the main (www) directory in the CNC area of your website. You can do this using an FTP program like Filezilla. The other option is to hire a web programmer to create and to install your robots.txt file by letting him know which pages you want to have blocked. If you chooses this option, a  good web programmer can complete the job in less than one hour.

How Page Caching Optimizes Your Site Performance

Page caching is another method which can help you to improve the load time of your web pages and thus optimize your site for the search engines. Page load time can significantly impact your user experience and your site’s ability into convert visitors into buyers or into leads. In fact, experiments at Google have revealed that just a half second’s difference in load times can cause up to a 20% reduction in web traffic. For this reason, the search engine companies are considering page load time to be an increasingly important factor for determining your site’s rank in the search results. This means you’ll need to take measure in reducing the size of your image files and your pages as a part of your SEO strategy.

Types of Page Caching

There are three methods which can be used to caching your web pages:

Alternative PHP caching
Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is an open source framework which caches data using intermediate PHP code. Most web programmers who are familiar with the PHP programming language can easily set up Alternative PHP Cache for your site.

Quickcache
Quickcache is a lightweight page caching solution which was formerly known as jpcache. Quickcache caches the page output rather than compiling the PHP page, making it a superior version of page caching to the Alternative PHP caching. Quickcache can be quickly downloaded from their website and can reduce your page load time up to 80%.

WP Super Cache
If you have a Wordpress website, WP Super Cache can be installed within seconds and without no programming knowledge.

Using Page Caching and Other Methods to Speed up Your Site

You can set up a combination of GZIP file compression or file deflation (which can reduce load times up to 70%)  HTML file size optimization (which can reduce load times up to 30%) and the movement of your design features and Javascript to external CSS style sheets and Javascript files (which can potentially reduce your page load time 50% or more) and double or even triple the performance of your website which will provide your visitors with a better user experience.

The basic top tips to optimize your web pages correctly

Follow the below basic top tips to optimize your pages correctly including existing, main pages and secondary ones so to present them to the search engines in a acceptable manner, generally accepted search engine algorithm rules.






Before you start

Decide on your goals for your SEO effort

Brainstorm a list of potential keywords
Use keyword research tools to narrow down the keyword list
Choose 1-5 keywords per page

Optimize tags and headings

Keyword in title tag
The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning.

Keyword in URL
Get your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

Keyword in Meta tags

It makes sense that you should include all of your keywords in the keyword meta tag. Do not include any words that don’t appear in the body of your text.

Keyword in ALT tags

Include your keyword at least once in the Alt tag of any images. Ensure that the text is relevant to the image and gives some information.

Description tag
Use the metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results. (40-140 characters long)

Edit content

Keyword density in document
3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.

Keyword in H1 and H2 headings
More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1 tags, then H2 tags and so on.

Keyword in the beginning of document
The closer you can get your keywords to the beginning of your page content the better. Try to include your primary keyword within the first sentence or two and also within the last paragraph.

Unique content
Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings. (300-500 words per page)

Optimize links

Anchor text of inbound links
It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don’t, it is still OK.

Origin of inbound links
Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.

Links from similar sites
Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.

Number of back links

Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc.

Other factors

Site accessibility
Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is inaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed.

Sitemap
It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.

Best Free Web hosting sites For your Business

Below are the list of free web hosting service which offer a "a free try before you buy" professional or business plan, and this is one of a good reason why you should use a free hosting service for a temporary service.

Web Hosting companies with Free Services

000webhost
 It is a good free web hosting service, making use of the WYSIWIG site builder, this web host and design site offers plenty to the most novices in website design. Some of the free Services offered by web are domain name, email, 1500 MB Web Space and 100 MB Bandwidth.

Hostinger

2000MB Space, 100GB Traffic
PHP and MySQL, Site Builder
No Ads or Banners
You can now build your site very quickly and easily. Even computer newbies can create a great and nice looking website with our simple website builder! Choose one of 100 ready templates and have your website ready in 5 minutes.

Yola
Yola offers a website hosting and designs for your website with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool, as well as controlled advertising, this free website hosting company(Yola) makes website creation so simple that every beginners can find their way through. This is a good option for new starters, especially with the options to upgrade later on.

Small business users can be able to their own website with paid-for add-ons when such situation arises.it also gives new web users to have stocks of free beautiful designs and templates to choose from, as well as paid-for premium themes. This is a good option for new starters, especially with the options to upgrade later on.

Webs
Web is another good free web hosting service, making use of the WYSIWIG site builder, this web host and design site offers plenty to the most novices in website design. Web offers a Mobile Website App, this give visitor to your site from any Smartphone a good mobile-friendly experience. Some of the free Services offered by web are domain name, email, 40 MB Web Space and 100 MB Bandwidth.



FreeHostia
FreeHostia website is another free web hosting service provider , FreeHostia hosting company offers a free service with 6 GB Monthly Bandwidth and 3 emails, 250 MB Web Space. It offers both Wordpress and Joomla templates for the blogging part of your website, and has no banners or any form of advertsement. 24/7 Customer Support of this website is very effective and this makes it more reliable.

FreeServers
Freeservers has over 4 million websites under their control; this hosting provider has the experience and age. They are operating with a lot of customers all over the world with high reputation of quality services. Services offer by freeservers are 50MB Web Space and 1 GB Monthly bandwidth, and is accompanied by massive advertising.

FortuneCity
FortuneCityn has been in existence since 1997, well known, well-used, and tested by many. Just like many other hosting service, FortuneCity has a good free service that will be enough for many users, and an affordable and reliable option that would be useful. This free service has its own blogging tool, 1 GB Web Space and Unlimited Monthly bandwidth. Users may also cut out advertising if they desire.

Bravenet
This is an Ad-supported free hosting, and plenty of scope with premium paid-for packages, this Web Host offers multi-domain hosting, 5 MB Web Space and 1.5 GB Monthly Bandwidth. Bravenet has alot of available options if the free services are okay by you but you still want more. Bravenet is a well-known name in the web hosting industry.

AwardSpace
Awardspace offer a free service with 250 MB Web Space and 5 GB Monthly bandwidth, this free web host has a good numbers of impressions. They are also sincere about the limitations of their free service, which includes limitations on the size of file, the number of outgoing emails, and non-availability of site builder. However, this host is an excellent option for owners of smaller websites.


AgilityHoster
With the option to upgrade to paid business or professional plans, this is a free web hosting service which a suitable option for polished small businesses and personal websites. This website offer two domains names, 200 MB Web Space and 5 GB Monthly bandwidth, this can be rarely found among other paid and free web hosting companies.

Free or limited web hosting is a good and suitable choice for Small businesses, individuals, or groups that only need a limited number of website options, and that don’t have any problem with advertising.
Before you sign up with any web hosting website always read the offers and services, Terms and FAQs, this will allow you to know more about their services and how you can get started.

How to effectively advertise online

If you’re marketing a product on the Internet, developing a successful advertising campaign is an important part of your success. However, this is an area in which many Internet marketers struggle. The way to ensure that you remain in profit each month is to promote the products, programs and services that cost you money each month. The amount earned depends on how effectively the product has been advertised. For effective advertisements one need to follow certain tips wisely.

Banner advertising – Don’t believe the hype you hear about it being useless. On the contrary, banner advertising can be a great passive method of attracting new prospects, as long as your banner is professionally made and compels viewers to click it.

Link Exchanges – There’s absolutely no doubt that exchanging links increases your Page Rank and Popularity ratings with major search engines. It just makes good business sense to have as many incoming and outgoing links to your web sites as possible!

Participating in message forums – They are fun and they are a good way to get your name out there. If you haven’t used forums before you are surely missing out on traffic to your websites. Most forums, not all, allow you to use a signature file at the end of your posts. So the more posts you make, the more times your link will be shown. Join forums that you have interest in and submit posts that have value and meaning. If you are on a forum and see a question that you know the answer to, be sure to make that post and submit your answer. The person that posted the original post is most likely going to read your response and visit your link. This goes the same with readers reading the post and responses.

Blog advertising – Create a blog on a free blogging service such as Blogger and begin posting about your business. You could post your sales and specials. You could also create product reviews on your blog and allow others to comment. Blogs are known to be indexed fairly fast with search engines to post to your blog often.

Basic seo tips

Why SEO?

If you own websites, whether for your business or personal use, you need to somehow attract traffic. Otherwise, owing a website is only just your personal endeavor or achievement. Websites need traffic – No doubt about that. Whether you share info or sell products, you need visitors to read or buy yours. No traffic equals no visitor No visitor equals no goals reached. Your visitors can come from many origins – From online and/or off line advertising, buzz or word of mouth, or the search engine. While the first two involve extraordinary content and a certain amount of investment, the last one need extra special care to optimize it.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is formatting your web site for search engines to easily read and understand your content. SEO is used to make your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords. If you aren’t on the first page for your keywords, it’s likely you won’t receive that much organic search engine traffic. Thus, the real goal of Search Engine Optimization is not to get high positions in search engines for your pages. It is to get more visitors to your website. SEO is like poker, it takes a few minutes to learn but a few years to master.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engine optimization works on the principle of satisfying search engine algorithms. Search engines used advanced mathematical equations to analyze and sort websites. Websites that correspond to those equations(algorithms) with highest relevancy get top spots in search results. The algorithms are somewhat decoded through various tests by search engine optimizers, however, there is no magic formula to find out how SEO works.

What are basic seo tips?

Keyword Rich Domain:
While choosing a domain keep in mind about your site’s main keyword. It’s always better to have the main keyword for your site in the domain part. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN offers more priority to those websites that has been hosted on the base of their main keyword. You will receive considerable amount of response form all the major search engines if your URL is main keyword based. But do not go for a keyword stuffed domain. This may bring you negative impact in terms of search engine response.

Use keywords on your site:
Using keywords on your site is one of the most important elements of any web site. Keywords should not only be used in the titles and headlines, but they shoud also be in the actual body of the text. An important aspect of SEO is to learn keyword research.

Title Tag:
This is another important On-Page factor that can offer you good search engine visibility if used wisely. This is an element that is absolutely under your control as a Webmaster. You need to use keywords for the title tag cleverly by selecting them. Be sure that these are the part on your web page that will be read by the visitors as well as by the search engines. Do not stuff keywords with the title tag. It will make you look Spammy on the job.

Meta tags:
These are descriptions on a web page that are not seen by most visitors except when looking at the page source code in their browser. While the keyword and description metatags used to be the primary way that search engines indexed sites, that is no longer the case. However, you shouldn’t ignore them entirely, as it is still worthwhile to include them as a part of your page description. For optimal SEO, your meta description and keyword tags should be no more than 150 characters each.

Optimize your images
Make sure all your images have alternative tags. Search engines cannot determine what is in your images. Alt tags tell the search engines what is in the image. Make sure your file names say what is in the picture. Seperate the words with dashes so that search engines can read your file names. For example, if you have a picture of a dog being trained name the file dog-being-trained.jpg.

Keyword density:
Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page. Rather than trying to focus on the number of times a keyword appears in the content of your page, aim for a more natural density by keeping your keyword phrases in mind as you write the copy for your page. Optimally, keyword density should be between 2% – 7%. There are a number of keyword density checkers available online to assist you with determining the keyword density of a page.

Inbound links:
Reciprocal link exchange (you link to my site and I’ll link to yours) used to be a great way to attract the attention of search engines to your site. Now, search engines pay attention only to the quality and popularity of the site providing you with an inbound link that is not a reciprocal link. One of the best ways to get quality inbound links back to your site is to submit articles to high traffic article directories and submit press releases to paid press release services.

Site maps:
There are sitemaps that help a visitor navigate a site, and sitemaps that are expressly designed for the search engines. The two are not the same. To enhance your site, submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer. Use XML Sitemaps to build search engine-friendly sitemaps on your sites.

Ways of efficient offline promotion for your website

Have you ever tried for offline promotion? Here are some methods for offline promotion of your website.

Business Cards
It is considered customary to put your signature when you post on forums and someone not doing so is viewed as one who is losing some traffic everyday. So, it comes as a surprise to me as to why so many of us shy away from putting our business urls on our business cards. In fact, the business card will last longer than the forum threads on search engines and are potential business hooks whenever the need arises. Having a business card is a great way to introduce people you meet in day-to-day life about your blogging activity. Business cards are also very inexpensive to purchase with most costing less than 1 cent per card.

Newspapers and Magazines
These are a very good source of advertising because so many people use them. It can be quite expensive to run full page color adverts in the national papers and glossy magazines, but you can start small. As a first step, you could try running a small advert in the classified section of your local papers. As your traffic and your business grow, you can move on to the larger national papers. Also, it would be worth finding out what sort of cost is involved in advertising in publications that gear more towards your specific product or service. This way you have more of a chance of reaching your target audience. Remember that people cannot copy and paste from newspapers to their browser’s address bar! Keep the urls simple and human readable.

Promotional Items
Give away items such as Pens, coffee mugs, key chains, coasters,calendars, sticky notesArticle Search, etc. should have your company logo and web address. Apart from building brand this also work as a dailyreminder for users of these items.

Readers Meet-up
If you have a substantial local reader base or live in a large metropolis, hold an official gathering for readers and people interested in your niche. It doesn’t have to be anything more than a casual get together to simply talk about the industry. This is a great way to strengthen the bond of your community and find new local readers. You can choose to hold these meetings at your home or at a more local and convenient location such as a restaurant, coffee shop, or even park.

Company Vehicles
How many vans, lorries and cars do you see everyday with phone numbers and company names plastered all over them. Your website address can be added to any part of your vehicle with a sticker, this exposes your URL to thousands of people everyday who are driving to work, going to the shops or even walking the dog. Make sure that you have this done professionally though. If it looks badly designed, it will probably reflect badly on your company.

How helpful is Tumblr in seo marketing and business ?

What is Tumblr?
Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog
There are 130.5 million blogs on Tumblr, as of August 2013
28th highest traffic site on the web according to Comscore
300 million unique monthly visitors according to Yahoo
Why Tumblr has a huge potential for SEO and social media marketing ?
With a large number of users Tumblr is good for business
1) Use a Custom Domain Name
You can have a customised domain name for your Tumblr blog which means you can use it as a fairly limited functioning website or as a primary blog for your business.

2) Dofollow links
When you consider the social aspect of Tumblr. Tumblr has social sharing functionality called "reblogging" in which Tumblr offers you a Dofollow backlink for each link you share.If you have a popular post it will be reposted to many other tumblrogs with backlinks. That means if you have a post that is reblogged 10 times, your tumblr blog just got 10 dofollow backlinks! you can also include link within the post itself. By doing so, both your original post on Tumblr, and the site linked to within the post will receive the backlinks.

3) Tumblr tags
Tumblr has a features of tagging which is very useful. If you want to add a tag, simply start typing a word and Tumblr will suggest you the relevant tags. Tumblr tags are already used for content discovery. Thus by using relevant tags, there is a good chance of your content to be discovered.

4)Optimised for Mobile If your existing website isn’t easy for mobile users to use or navigate and you don’t yet have the time or the resources to spend optimising it for mobile, a Tumblr blog will help to give you a mobile presence. Your website designer can tell you more about this.

5) Interlink with Google Analytics
You can monitor and analyse your traffic to your Tumblr blog using Google Analytics.

6) Photos
Photos section is very popular in teenagers so use a clever caption and get more backlinks.

7) Branding
Tumblr is an excellent platform for promoting your brands. With Tumblr becoming more and more popular, it’s a perfect marketing tool for businesses that are trying to extend their reach. With more than 300 million unique users, you can easily promote your brand. By posting quality content, you will have a strong online presence on Tumblr.

How to get a good domain name for blog or website

When setting up a blog first thing comes in my mind is getting a good domain name.
So today I am teaching you how important is getting a good domain name for your blog or website.

What is domain name?

 Domain names are used to identify one or more IP addresses. For example, the domain name microsoft.com represents about a dozen IP addresses. Domain names are used in URLs to identify particular Web pages.
Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top level domain (TLD) it belongs to. There are only a limited number of such domains. For example:
gov - Government agencies
edu - Educational institutions
org - Organizations (nonprofit)
mil - Military
com - commercial business
net - Network organizations
ca - Canada
th - Thailand
Because the Internet is based on IP addresses, not domain names, every Web server requires a Domain Name System (DNS) server to translate domain names into IP addresses.


Why pick a good domain name?

You have to pick a good domain because you will stuck with the domain for the rest of blog's life.

How to pick a good domain?

Getting a good domain is not to hard.Use the following guidelines to choose your domain name:

Use Keywords:

Use keywords in the domain name that describe your site. The domain name should suggest the nature of your product or service. A good domain name describes exactly what the site is about. It is important for a visitor to get an idea of what the website is about just by looking at the domain name. For example if your site is about cars and bikes then try to get a domain name like “www.cars.com” or “www.bikes.com" not “www.anything.com”.


Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains

If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this one. However, if you're at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that's out there - don't make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks.

Do not choose Hyphenated names
Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type. I'd suggest not using spelled-out or roman numerals in domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other.

Disadvantages
It's easy to forget the hyphens when typing a name. Many users are used to typing things like freesoftwares.com but not free-softwares.com. They'll probably leave out the hyphens and end up at your competitor's site.

When people recommend your site to their friends verbally, having hyphens in your domain name leads to more potential errors than when the name does not contain hyphens.

Easily remember:

A domain name should be easy to remember because your visitors will want to type in the domain name in the web browser for revisits and if they can’t remember the domain name then you run the risk of losing potential traffic. It is also easier to spread the word of mouth when the domain name is easy to remember.

Short name:

A domain name should be short with less than 10 characters. It also helps the “Easy to remember” point when the name is short. Although, these days it’s incredibly hard to get domain names that are short. Basically you don’t want to end up with a super long domain name like “www.howtogetadomainname.com”. When the name gets too long it gets confusing and the name can be easily mistyped in the browser.


In general, a seo friendly domain name should be short and sweet.