Importance of Social Media Marketing

                                      

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels. Marketing is essential to any business and is generally referred to as the most important aspect of any business strategy.
Any business becomes profitable only if the end product promised by the company or the entrepreneur is really as good as advertised and produces customer satisfaction. There is no sure-shot formula for success using marketing since it only gives more visibility to the business and the end sales depend only on the efficiency of the product. However, social media marketing is an important tool that, when properly used is a highly beneficial and promising enterprise.
Social media marketing includes a lot of things such as blogs, video sharing, community and many more. If you give a look at internet then you will get millions of Social media marketing but you have to choose the top ranked sites in which more visitors are coming. Linkedin, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are the most famous focal point for marketing. Sponsoring your company using these social media sites is a very smart business proposal since they provide a huge amount of constant traffic everyday. In recent days, social networking is really successful and the marketing through these sites are very essential to a trade because millions of people are accessing these sites regularly.


 The most important benefit of Social Media Marketing is the fact that – especially considering the number of users of networks such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter – the possibilities for exposure and growth are limitless. Moreover, one cannot ignore the speed and ease with which news is able to spread among users of social networking sites and beyond.
When considering how to first approach a Social Media Marketing strategy, it is of the utmost importance to understand your audience and the kinds of products/services that they are interested in. For instance, if your customers are the type to readily participate in online social networks, it may be beneficial to add a blog to your company website. In addition, you may request that interested employees add information/blog articles to your company site to generate interest – never forgetting to add the company logo and other features which will identify your brand into these entries.

Another way to use the popularity of social networking to the advantage of your corporation is to perhaps join one or more of the most popular social networking sites and begin discussions, groups, etc. around your relevant products and services.

Major Importance OF Social Media Marketing

1) Branding
2) Lead Generation
3) Engage with its customers
4) Generate Relevant Traffic
5) Improve ROI
6) Getting Customer Feedbacks
7) Announcing New products or services
8) Know more About Customer Preferences
9) Influence on Search Engine Rankings
10) Enhance Customer Relationship Management

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Landing Page Optimization Tips

In marketing terms, it's a specialized page that visitors are directed to once they've clicked on a link, usually from an outside source such as a Pay Per Click ad. The page is usually tightly focused on a particular product or service with the aim of getting the visitor to buy or take some form of action rapidly that will ultimately lead to a sale.

A different view on landing pages

Many site owners believe that the way the visit to sale process works is this:

Client arrives on their home page

Client selects an option from a menu or an offer on the page

Client arrives on the page with the offer/product

Client purchases.

The basics of developing landing pages

There a few questions to ask yourself when creating a landing page:

What are you offering?
Who do you wish to appeal to?
Why would they be interested in your offer?
What do they need to do to participate/purchase?

Before Creating a Landing Page you should KNOW…

Business Objectives

The business objective of the campaign and in particular the page. What problem are you trying to solve?

Know Your Audience

Understand the goals and motivations of the users who will be arriving at your landing page. What are the main questions that a potential visitor will have? Knowing this will allow you to design an experience that answers these questions in priority sequence on the page.

Visitor Action

The desired action of the visitor (primary CTA). Sounds simple, but if you don’t have a very specific idea in mind, your page can lose focus.

Entry Points

Take note of all campaign entry points (email, organic, PPC, social media) and any existing collateral materials to ensure you maintain a consistent brand experience and design. If your landing page doesnʼt match the aesthetic of the banner ad then people will often rightfully assume they are in the wrong place and leave.

Technical limitations of your target audience

Are they iPhone users? Are they business people with laptops that still view everything on 1024×780? Or are they designers with big 24” iMacs?

Creative brief

Ideally there will be a well defined concept that ties business and user goals together into a simple and implementable idea. This will help you to design something that doesnʼt stray from the core goals of the campaign. If you are a small business or entrepreneur then this might seem like a bit of a luxury (or an extreme waste of time). If you’ve never used a brief before, try searching for some examples or templates – it can be really useful to go through the process of creating a simple half page brief just to get the idea down on paper before you commit it to digital realm.

Tips For Landing Pge Optimization


Clean & clear headline: Crisp is how the landing page headlines should be. Language used should be exact. This way you keep your visitor oriented and engaged.

Straight forward Call to Action: Tell the visitors what they need to do. Use buttons or well-linked text or you can use both. We can use a minimum of 2 call to action in a short landing page while 3-5 in a long LP (usually long LP is not preferred, but if there’s no way out because of the number of products, need to use them).

Emphasize benefits: Why will someone care about your company/product/service until it benefits him/her. The benefits are to be brought out in the content. This will help the visitor to quickly act accordingly.

Persuasive message: The message conveyed has to be persuasive. The features, products/services & the benefits can always be put forward in an urge manner which helps the visitor to make a decision.

Tight copy: Too much of content is always boring for someone who needs info quickly. Lack of clutter, clear & specific detailed content will help any visitor clicking the ad. Readers will read long landing page copy as long as you keep building a strong, motivating case for him/her to act. However, remember 2 things which are critical with respect to landing page copy.

Mention offers clearly: Keep your body copy in line with the offer. There has to be a logical progression from your headline to the landing page offers.

Highlight key info in bulleted points: Most of the viewers usually browse through & not read the content. Information is needed quickly. Make sure that they get everything required without having them to slow down.

Contact, Certificates & Testimonials check: Ensure that the contact details are mentioned appropriately in the landing page, so that the visitors can reach you easily (either on Phone/ Email). Certificates and testimonials builds trust in the minds of the visitors about your company & services.

The form has to be visible on the upper fold: Ask not for too much but the necessary info to complete the desired action (sale/lead). Be judicious & confidential in the given information. To be placed in the upper fold so that the visitor can access it easily.

Simple clean images: Images are always the eye-catchers. The landing page images used have to be a supportive medium for the content in the landing page. If the offering is a service, then you can show an image which explains the offering.
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SEO Basics:On Page Optimization

It takes more than just good content to get your website ranked well by search engines. Your site has probably not ranked well enough till now only because your site was not very “understandable” to the search engines. Let’s say there has been a communication gap in between the two. However, it is not an irreversible state… this is a very common problem and can easily be corrected with some ‘On-page Optimization’

1. Start with keyword research
What is keyword research? Keyword research is the practice of finding relevant search terms and phrases that people use in conducting searches online and determining the keywords most suited to your website.
So let’s start with your site, since your website targets used car buyers, what words would they type in the search engine? Note down your keywords. It probably includes ‘Buy used cars’, ‘Used cars on sale’, ‘Price of used cars’ etc.
After compiling a list of probable keywords/phrases that your target audience might use in the search engines, you can go one step further & use some great keyword research tools available online.

2. Website Structure
Every website’s coding structure is divided in to two parts: a Head and a Body. If you are thinking that I am going to teach you coding and programming, I’m not! Rather, I am just going to explain how you can tweak certain elements in each of these sections to your advantage:
The Invisible <HEAD> Portion
The HEAD is like a cover page of a book which gives direct information about its content. The HEAD consists of multiple tags with the Title and Meta tags being the more important ones.
• Title: The title is what appears on the top of your browser, giving brief information about the page. The title is important because the search engines use it to determine the theme & context of the site, the same way we read the title of a book to know what it’s about. For instance, if you had concluded from your keyword research that the terms ‘Used cars’ & ‘Buy used cars’ would be your target terms, your title could perhaps be ‘Buy Used Cars at Low Prices: 1000s of Used Cars for Sale’, rather than an indirect title like ‘We offer the best rides’. However, don’t overuse the keyword, we have used the terms ‘Used cars’ just twice & in proper context. A combination of keywords put together like ‘Used cars, buy cars, sell cars’ could be considered spammy.Another reason why you wouldn’t want to stuff your title with just keywords & make it user friendly is because the title is what is displayed by the search engines when showing your site in the search results.

• Meta tags:
a. Meta keywords is a tag that is no longer considered as important by the search engines but it is still considered good practice to optimize. It’s a tag which contains a list of your target key terms for that page. E.g.
b. Meta description is a brief snippet about the contents of the page that could be used by the search engine when displaying your site details in the search results. If you do not give a meta description, you have no control over what the search engines will display when showing your results.

The Visible Portion
The BODY in html consists of everything that is visible to people who open your website. Think of it like the actual content of a book with many pages. There are multiple elements in the BODY which you would want to consider tweaking.
• Headings: Heading tags (H1, H2 tags) are used to label your headline and are considered important information by search engines. Search engines assume that headings give an idea about the theme of the page and are thought to be given slightly more importance than the page content itself. It should be carefully chosen and injected with relevant keywords.
• Content: You want to make sure you include the right keywords in the contents of your page. You want to ensure you include similar words and phrases through out the content while ensuring it’s not overdone. Again, if your page targets “used cars”, you might want to distribute the keywords “used cars” through out the page while at the same time also including other similar keywords like “old cars” and “second sale cars”. Using similar keywords through out also helps. Although it’s very important to remember that while writing your content, you want to first focus on writing for your end user and making the content most appealing to them. Only once that objective is achieved, then you can try incorporating these changes in your content to suit the the search engines while ensuring you’re not compromising on the quality of the content.
Some of us also get so caught up in making our site attractive, forgetting that search engines cannot read Flash animations. So if you want to have a Flash based website, you want to make sure you also include a non-flash version for the search engines to read (some of your users as well might prefer viewing a non-flash version).

Optimizing your Internal Linking Structure: Internal linking allows users to navigate to other sections of your website. Internal linking plays a crucial role in page ranking. Use relevant anchor text, with keywords of course, to link to other pages of your website, but only if it’s relevant.
For example, if your website is offering offers on select models, you can include, “More cars for sale” instead of, “To avail offers go to: www.usedcars.com”. Clicking on ‘cars for sale’ will take them directly to the page.
• Do not leave images unattributed: Search engines can read only text, not images. By using alt attribute in your image tags, you can describe images with text, letting search engines detect images which are otherwise left ignored. When an internet user looks for images on search engines like Google image search, only websites that have textual descriptions of images will show up. For example: if you have a picture of an Audi, make sure you enter the name ‘Audi’ for the picture. The search engines might not be able to view the picture, but they will know that you have a picture of an Audi in your site through the tag.
3. Other Things to Consider
• URLs should be informative to search engines: Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address used to locate documents on the World Wide Web. Keywords in page URL helps it to get noticed by search engines. Each page of your site has a different address called URL. For example, the URL for your website may be www.usedcars.com and the URL for its web page can be www.usedcars.com/porche/carrera.html. Avoid using random text and numbers like www.usedcars.com/wrqew11/022vds.html. This doesn’t tell search engines anything about the contents of the page. Short URLs often work best, but if it is not possible, use relevant words separated with hyphens (‘-‘).
• Stop being inactive: Update your website regularly with unique content. Don’t just update content, but keep adding more pages to your website. Search engines are looking for fresh, updated information and changes are being made by the minute on the internet.
Common mistakes you can avoid:
Now, don’t think you know how to do on-page optimization by reading the above mentioned points. You don’t want to be one of the many whose fall is caused by ignorance, no no! There are many mistakes that people make while doing on-page optimization. I have listed them below for your benefit… so that you do not make the same mistakes.
1. No space for copycats: Copying content from other websites is a no-no. It’s not only unethical but search engines can detect content duplication in a jiffy and filter it out, bringing your ranking down. Websites like www.copyscape.com help to track copied content.
2. No cheating: Hiding text using the same color as the background or placing them behind images are old tricks. You can fool visitors but not search engines. Avoid keyword stuffing, as mentioned earlier.
You probably didn’t realize that the changes you would need to make would be this simple. On-page optimization can take you a long way in getting noticed by the search engines. So if you have not implemented these changes already, do it now! You can thank me later when the search engines keep coming back to your site!

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How to Increase Organic (Free) Traffic Of a Website

When you get search traffic naturally from the various search engines it is called organic traffic. This is primarily done by using a technique called SEO. SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, and there are certain, well-recognized first steps for SEO that will serve to gain you substantial organic traffic from natural searches by humans typing them into the popular engines.

It should be immediately obvious to you why gaining this organic traffic is beneficial to your site. If you want your work recognized or want visitors to your site without having to pay for advertising, the best way and most sustainable method is by the use of the popular search engine optimization steps. They should be put to use in any article, website, or blog you write. If you do not use these methods your success at capturing targeted, organic traffic from the search engines will be limited or nonexistent.

Tips For Getting Organic Traffic

1. Include relevant content, relevant to your page description and Meta keywords.
2. Instead of changing your URL or redirecting from your old URL to your new URL, follow Google's procedure on URL changes to make sure your new site doesn't get skipped, or just avoid URL changes if you can.
3. Don't post duplicate content on your site, so if you quote another page only include a small excerpt and don't repeat your own content on multiple pages.
4. Avoid flash, even though it looks cool, flash and animated banners and intros annoy visitors and search engine bots don't read them.
5. Submit to quality directories.
6. Make sure your robot.txt files are not blocking destination URLs that you do not want blocked.
7. Choose your Meta keywords wisely and include them in your content.
8. Strive to obtain quality links into your site.
9. If you use icon or image links, include a text link.
10. If you operate an affiliate site, make your site a valuable resource, so people chose your site rather than go straight to your affiliate.
11. Add a site map.
12. Don't use link schemes.
13. Write specific content, so searches can find applicable results. Instead of writing "books," write "medical text books" or "organic cookbooks"; be specific.
14. If you include low quality links on your site, block them from being scanned by Googlebot.
15. Don't break up your content too much, like loads of banner ads and so on in the middle or your text, irritates readers and bots.
16. Write unique and compelling content.
17. Don't forget to include your page descriptions.
18. Don't bury text content in images.
19. Look for un-indexed URLs, URL with more than a few parameters or dynamic links, they may be skipped.
20. Stay up-to-date on SEO, your strategies need to constantly evolve.
21. Deliver what you promise, don't drive readers to inapplicable or irrelevant pages.
22. Carefully consider your titles, make sure to include targeted keywords.
23. Don't forget humor or other devices that attract and keep readers.
24. Add text links with anchor links.
25. Keep links out and in up-to-date.
26. Start a blog or forum if it makes sense on your site.
27. Join BBB or your local Chamber of Commerce or other reputable business associations.
28. Submit articles to respectable and active article sites.
29. Add Alt tags to images for people that disable images.
30. Validate and 508 your site for accessibility.
31. Submit your business description to Wikipedia or other popular information sites.
32. Consider adding maps or mashups.
33. Submit to multiple search engines.
34. Consider marketing some of your subpages or articles that have less competition.
35. Don't forget good old-fashion PR.
36. Start a little controversy.
37. Consider adding an RSS feed.
38. Write "top ten" lists, which are popular with article search sites.
39. Build a good site that others want to link to.
40. Eliminate grammar and spelling errors.
41. Publish a privacy policy.
42. Send out press releases when it makes sense.
43. Avoid hidden text and links.
44. Keep your content up-to-date.
45. Don't employ redirects or "cloaking."
46. Don't create pages with bad content, like viruses, trojans, malware and so on.
47. Steer clear of empty, unoriginal affiliate pages.
48. Make sure every page is assessable through at least on static text link.
49. Use text, instead of images to relate important content.
50. Check for broken links.
51. Don't put too many links on one page, even if it is a resource page, keep it well under 100.
52. Test out your site with a text browser.
53. Be leery of badly placed session IDs and arguments.
54. Employ the IF-Modified-Since HTTP header to let Google know if your content has changed.
55. Don't use "&id=" as a URL parameter, they are not indexed.
56. Avoid deceptive or manipulative techniques.
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Important SEO Resources

               

                                               

If you want to learn SEO, and actually get good at it, read and use the following resources:

         SEO Blogs

1. Search Engine Land
2. Search Engine Guide
3. Search Engine Watch
4. SEOmoz
5. Online Marketing Blog
6. Search Engine Roundtable
7. SEO Book
8. Matt Cutts
9. Search Engine Journal
10. Marketing Pilgrim
11. John Battelle’s Search Blog
12. Google Blog
13. Traffick
14. SEO by the Sea
15. Google Blogoscoped
16. SEO Black Hat
17. Wolf Howl

  SEO Information

18. Search Engine Comparison Chart
19. Marketing Terms
20. Google’s SEO Guidelines
21. SEO Beginners Guide
22. SEO Chat
23. Search Engine Colossus
24. Web Pro News
25. Simplifying SEO
26. SEO Cheat Sheet
27. SEO FAQ
28. SEO Pyramid

SEO Tools

29. SEO ToolSet
30. SpyFu
31. SEOmoz’s Tools
32. Wordtracker
33. Meta Tag Analyzer
34. Google Toolbar
35. Anchor Text Analyzer
36. Google Webmaster Tools
37. Digital Point SEO Tools
38. SEO Chat Tools
39. SEO for Firefox
40. AdWords Estimator
41. DIYSEO
42. Backlink Checker
43. Google Datacenter Search

SEO Forums

44. High Rankings Forum
45. Webmaster World
46. SEO Chat Forum
47. Digital Point Forum
48. Search Engine Watch Forum
49. SEO Black Hat Forum

SEO Conferences

50. Search Engine Strategies
51. PubCon
52. Blueglass
53. SMX

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Advantages of SEO Services

Most of people on Internet like to use search engines to search of a specific product or service. You product listing should be on top pages in major search engines. You can take services from SEO service providers to achieve specific target. SEO advantages includes targeting traffic, increase brand visibility, increase in sales etc. Keywords optimization plays significant role in making your best choice. SEO is very much cost effective method of marketing. Other advantages of SEO include best usability, browser compatibility and accessibility. Better SEO services will increase in sales and to increase your business services, affiliate business and credibility. SEO services can also increase your confidence and authority as well. Many search engines list websites for free however some of them extra top listings. SEO service providers can help you to get in top listings. If SEO services are implemented effectively then it can increase target traffic to your site and rank your site for long term basis as well. There are many SEO techniques are there and you can choose one best service from them. Any of these methods can be used to rank your website. However an ongoing SEO campaign must be used to get target result from your website.

• Traffic concerned
  SEO can increase the number of visitors who seek your service or product actively.
• Promotion that doesn 'sleep of T
  Imagine to have your own company of sale and promotions working exclusively just for you! One which functions 24 hours over 24,7 days per week, 365 days each year. That 's the advantage of SEO!
• Increase the visibility of mark
  SEO can give to your mark a high international profile - and for comparatively low expenditure.
• High KING
  Hammer for book, dollar for the dollar, SEO brings a higher return to you on your investment than any comparable form of marketing.
• Higher sales
  SEO can mean greater sales of your product or service.
• Faster and smaller pages
  The correctly validated and optimized files will be smaller and thinner, meaning less requests/overheads for server and faster times of remote loading.
• Long-term positioning
  Once places from there, a site correctly conceived and optimized remains long-term in the rows compared with the PC where the costs and the expenditure are continuous and unforeseeable.
• Profitable
  SEO is among the most profitable manners of marketing.
• Accessibility
  To observe significant procedures of optimization can make your site more accessible to all the users.
• Compatibility of Cross-navigator
  A site correctly optimized also almost like possible will be validated with the elevated levels. This means that it should function in all the navigators of W3C-compliant, meaning that your site can be looked by the greatest potential number of visitors.
• Navigable by the engines
  All the bonds should function correctly and all the pages should be accessible to the engines, of this fact making your site easy for the engines to correctly index and classify by category.
• Profitability
  To observe the basic directives of optimization should mean that the visitors have more pleasant experience of user.
• No need to start more
  We should be able to work with your existing design.
• Fast execution
  SEO can start rather because we have access of ftp to your site - or even front if we make a bond campaign.
• Short-term results
  You should start to see a positive difference in weeks if not.
• No need for aesthetic compromise
  Your site should maintain its glance distinctive and feel front, during and after optimization.
• Integrate with your existing site
  The major part of the work of optimization will be in the slides, gained you 'notification of it.

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Introduction to digital media

There are six main types of digital media channels or communications tools which marketers should review when developing their online media plans. This document gives a short introduction to each technique with examples.

1. Search engine marketing (SEM)

• Search engine marketing (SEM) – placing messages on a search engine encouraging clickthrough to a web site when the user types a specific keyword phrase.

The two main disciplines are Search engine optimisation (SEO) to boost a companies position in the natural search listings and Paid search marketing which uses sponsored ads typically on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis.
Search marketing is great for targeting audiences at the moment of intent. It can help create a level playing field where small companies are listed alongside well-known brands to increase their awareness and drive response. That’s if the small companies can get SEO right or afford to compete in paid search.
Ultralase example of SEM.

Definition for Search engine optimisation (SEO): A structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in search engine natural or organic results listings for selected keyword phrases. Main techniques involve targeting keyphrases to rank within site copy and through linking strategies. No cost per click!
Definition for Pay Per Click (PPC) search marketing, e.g. Google AdWords A relevant text ad with a link to a company page is displayed when the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase. A fee is charged for every click of each link, with the amount bid for the click and its Quality Score determining its position. Trusted feed is the uploading of product data to a Product Comparison engine such as Google Product Search (Froogle).

2. Online PR

• Online PR – Maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on a range of third party web sites such as media sites, social networks and blogs, which are likely to be visited by your target audience.

Online PR can offer a low-cost route to increase awareness of your brand, it can also help attract visitors and increases backlinks to a site, which is useful for SEO.
Definition for Online PR Maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on third party web sites which are likely to be visited by your target audience. Includes use of blogs (online diaries, RSS (Really Simple Syndication feeds) and Web 2.0 social media techniques (C2C = Customer to Customer). Also requires managing negative comments about a company within social networks by monitoring and responding as appropriate. Closely related to viral marketing.

3. Online partnerships

• Online Partnerships - Creating and managing long term arrangements to promote your online services on third party web site or e-mail communications. Different forms of partnership include link building, affiliate marketing, online sponsorship and co-branding.

Smart online marketers realise the value of partnerships in extending their reach into their audiences via other sites.
Ultralase example of affiliate marketing
This affiliate is a forum discussing laser eye surgery. It is prominent in the natural listings. Ultralase has a banner on every page as shown, helping awareness and driving response.

 Definition for Affiliate marketing A commission based arrangement where referring sites (publishers) receive a commission on sales, leads or visits by merchants (retailers)’.

4. Interactive advertising

• Interactive advertising - Use of online display ads such as banners, skyscrapers and rich media ads to achieve brand awareness and encourage clickthrough to a target site.

Ultralase example of Online advertising
Ultralase advertises extensively online. They have found that if they reduce spend it reduces awareness resulting in poorer results from natural search.

• Definition for Interactive advertising* All types of advertising through the Web, wireless and interactive television. Interactive advertising can include banners, site sponsorships, email ads, PPC search engine ads and classified ads.

Definition for Online sponsorship Linking of a brand with related content or context through sponsored graphical or text links for the purpose of creating brand awareness, favourability and/or response.

5. Email Marketing

• Opt-in e-mail – Renting opt-in e-mail lists, placing ads in third-party e-newsletters, making deals with third parties for co-registration or co-branding of e-mails, or building your own in-house e-mail list and sending e-newsletters or email campaigns.

The main aims of email marketing for acquisition is to generate awareness of brands or offerings or direct response to achieve registration or leads.
Definition for Email marketing The use of outbound email marketing to achieve awareness, add value or achieve response

6. Viral marketing

• Viral marketing – Viral marketing is effectively online word of mouth – messages are forward to help achieve awareness. The message either contains or has a link to a site containing videos, pictures, games, jokes, information

Definition Online viral marketing Word of mouth, online. Viral marketing uses a powerful offer to be transmitted amongst a network of people via electronic media to reach a large audience cost effectively to generate prospects, build brand awareness and so increase sales

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Holiday Packages

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"Dine Yummy, Get Lucky

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What is Robots.txt

Robots.txt

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is to use a robots.txt file.

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. That is why we say that if you have really sen sitive data, it is too naïve to rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in search results.

The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt) and if they don't find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way. So, if you don't put robots.txt in the right place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

The concept and structure of robots.txt has been developed more than a decade ago and if you are interested to learn more about it, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/ or you can go straight to the Standard for Robot Exclusion because in this article we will deal only with the most important aspects of a robots.txt file. Next we will continue with the structure a robots.txt file.
Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines' crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/
The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

Tools to Generate and Validate a Robots.txt File

Having in mind the simple syntax of a robots.txt file, you can always read it to see if everything is OK but it is much easier to use a validator, like this one: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml. These tools report about common mistakes like missing slashes or colons, which if not detected compromise your efforts. For instance, if you have typed:

User agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

this is wrong because there is no slash between “user” and “agent” and the syntax is incorrect.

In those cases, when you have a complex robots.txt file – i.e. you give different instructions to different user agents or you have a long list of directories and subdirectories to exclude, writing the file manually can be a real pain. But do not worry – there are tools that will generate the file for you. What is more, there are visual tools that allow to point and select which files and folders are to be excluded. But even if you do not feel like buying a graphical tool for robots.txt generation, there are online tools to assist you. For instance, the Server-Side Robots Generator offers a dropdown list of user agents and a text box for you to list the files you don't want indexed. Honestly, it is not much of a help, unless you want to set specific rules for different search engines because in any case it is up to you to type the list of directories but is more than nothing.
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Important Tips For Creating a Seo friendly website

Step 1. Website analysis - analyse your website thoroughly before publishing it.


Step 2. Keyword Research - use Google Adwords to find good keywords with low competition.


Step 3. Google Webmaster Tools account - setup & monitor progress.


Step 4. Add Emphasis with Header Tags - try to use h1-h5 header tags to make content stand out.


Step 5. Bold font - make important things stand out by making them bold.


Step 6. Canonicalization - avoid duplicate content using Google's new meta tag.


Step 7. Competition Analysis - check out what your competition has.


Step 8. CSS Validation - make sure your CSS is perfect before publishing.


Step 9. HTML Code Clean Up & Optimization - make it perfect!


Step 10. Image & Hyper link Optimization - very important that your hyper links are accurate and descriptive.


Step 11. Link Validation - validate every internal link on your site!


Step 12. Meta Description Tag Optimization - make your description short, informative and to the point.


Step 13. Meta Keywords Tags Optimization - Google do not actually use the meta keywords tag what so ever so save yourself some time and don't make one!

Step 14. Navigation & Design Optimization - if your navigation is faulty, people won't use your site.

Step 15. PR Sculpting - PR is really not that important if you don't care about link juice.

Step 16. Robots.txt Optimization - use Google web master tools if you don't know how to make a robots.txt


Step 17. Title Tag Optimization - remember that the title is what Google will display for your search results!


Step 18. URL Rewrite - use important keywords in the links itself!

Step 19. W3C Validation - validate your sites content!


Step 20. Link Development - develop backlinks to improve your own PR and ranking.
Post on forums such as this one, Digital Point and V7N to receive easy backlinks.

Step 21. Check Broken Links - ensure that you don't have broken links (dead links)!


Step 22. Directory Submissions - submit your site to directories for easy backlinks!


Step 23. Internal Link Structuring - use a hierarchical structure for your folders if you don't know otherwise!


Step 24. Manual Link Request to Related Sites - swap links with your competition!

Step 25. One way links - purchase one way links from PR4 sites or greater.
Directories - Easy to find, easy to buy links on!

Step 26. Count Backlinks - ensure your backlinks are steadily increasing using a backlink checker.


Step 27. Local Search Engine Optimization - make sure that Google list your site locally if you are a local business!

Step 28. Website Usability & Conversion - calculate your conversion rate, then improve it.
Number of visitors divided by the number of sales eg. 100 visitors and 5 sales = 100/5 = 5% conversion rate.

Step 29. Installing Usability Tools on Website - easier it is, the more likely users will return!

Step 30. Monthly Website Conversion Tracking - ensure your website is working and profitable!
Number of visitors divided by of sales eg 50 visitors and 5 sales = 50/5 = 10% conversion rate.

Step 31. Optimization for Multiple Browsers - it may look good in your browser but not in others.


Step 32. Article Submission - submit articles containing your link to article directories!

Step 33. Blog Comment on Relevant Blogs - high PR blogs are a great source of backlinks.

Step 34. Blog Designing for the website - create a blog about your website and fill it with content.

Step 35. Blog Submission - submit your blog to directories and ping it ever once and a while.


Step 36. Classified submission - submit your site to free classified ads!


Step 37. Create Promotional pages on hub pages - quick and easy!


Step 38. Social Network Marketing - take advantage of groups catered to your niche.


Step 39. Paid Submission - pay someone to submit your site to directories for you!


Step 40. Press Release - create a press release and submit it.


Step 41. RSS Feeds - submit RSS feeds!


Step 42. Social Bookmarking - Pligg sites are a great way to get quick backlinks for free.


Step 43. Video Submission - use videos on sites such as youtube to promote your site or product!


Step 44. Content Writing & Optimization - optimize your content for your keywords/niche.

Step 45. Blog Writing - fill your blog with quality information.

Step 46. Content Modification - if someone else's is better, beat them with better content.

Step 47. Website Spell Check - this is crucial, never publish without a spell check first!


Step 48. XML Site Map Creation & Submission - create a sitemap and upload if to your site then submit it to the search engines!


Step 49. Check server headers - make sure people can access your site without errors.


Step 50. Check Search Engine Road Blocks - web master tools will inform you of crawling errors.


Step 51. Check PR of site to see how you are doing!

10 Important Web Design Tips For a SEO Friendly Website

1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website. If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to read by search engines.
2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines. To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.
3. Every page should contain the "title" and "description" tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.
4. Try not to use Flash when possible. Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and makes people run away
5. Think twice on how to use graphics. Make them relevant to your content and use an Alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s).
6. Do not only use images to link out. You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.
7. Avoid using frames. Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.
8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.
9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster. It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.
10. Use standard HTML. Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than it needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that can't be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or not index the whole web page. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html.

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