Your site URLs are like the bridges between your website and a search engine’s crawler: crawlers need to be able to find and cross those bridges (i.e., find and crawl your URLs) in order to get to your site’s content. If your URLs are complicated or repetative, crawlers are going to spend time tracing and retracing their steps; if your URLs are organized and lead directly to distinct content, crawlers can spend their time accessing your content rather than crawling through empty pages, or crawling the same content over and over via different URLs.

Remove user-specific details from URLs.
Remove any URL parameters that change the content of the page—like session IDs or sort order from the URL and put into a cookie.

Disallow actions which Googlebot can’t perform.

If you are using your robots.txt file, you can disallow crawling of login pages, contact forms, shopping carts, and other pages whose sole function is to disallow a crawler from indexing.

With one URL, keep one set of content.
In an ideal world, there’s a one-to-one pairing between URL and content: each URL leads to a unique piece of content, and each piece of content can only be accessed via one URL. The closer you can get to this ideal, the more streamlined your site will be for crawling and indexing. If your CMS or current site setup makes this difficult, you can use the rel=canonical element to indicate the preferred URL for a particular piece of content.

A robots.txt is a file placed on your server to tell the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.

All search engines, or at least all the important ones, now look for a robots.txt file as soon their spiders or bots arrive on your site. So, even if you currently do not need to exclude the spiders from any part of your site, having a robots.txt file is still a good idea, it can act as a sort of invitation into your site.

There are a number of situations where you may wish to exclude spiders from some or all of your site.

You are still building the site, or certain pages, and do not want the unfinished work to appear in search engines.

You have information that, while not sensitive enough to bother password protecting, is of no interest to anyone but those it is intended for and you would prefer it did not appear in search engines.

Most people will have some directories they would prefer were not crawled – for example do you really need to have your cgi-bin indexed? Or a directory that simply contains thank you or error pages.

If you are using doorway pages (similar pages, each optimized for an individual search engine) you may wish to ensure that individual robots do not have access to all of them. This is important in order to avoid being penalized for spamming a search engine with a series of overly similar pages.

You would like to exclude some bots or spiders altogether, for example those from search engines you do not want to appear in or those whose chief purpose is collecting email addresses.

The very fact that search engines are looking for them is reason enough to put one on your site. Have you looked at your site statistics recently? If your stats include a section on ‘files not found’, you are sure to see many entries where search engines spiders looked for, and failed to find, a robots.txt file on your site.

Duplicate content is the substantive block of content within or across domains that either that completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when it is found, it is either unintentional or at least not malicious in origin such as forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across different domains in order to manipulate search engine rankings or gather more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.

Again, Google algorithms don’t view the same article written in English and German as duplicate content. Users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches. In contrast, they’re understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results.

Google tries to show distinct information while it crawls and searches information. if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither of the set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, It will choose either of the version to its list. In certain rare cases, Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate its rankings and deceive its user, it also makes appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. So in major cases, the worst thing that webmasters will see is the “less desired” version of a page shown in Google index.

Webmasters usually consider keyword meta tags important for on-page optimization of the website. However, Google doesn’t use the “keyword” meta tags in web search rankings.

This is because Google can sell its search appliance product which could include the keywords meta tag but this is different from web search and therefore it doesn’t gives weightage to keyword meta tags. They simply don’t effect the search ranking in Google at all.

Secondly, earlier search engines judged the content of the pages and not other off page factors such as links that point to the page. So at that time, keyword meta tags became a choice whereby one could stuff irrelevant keyword without typical visitors ever seeing these keywords and this was so abused that Google started disregarding keyword meta tags.

However, Google still use the “description” meta tag as the text for its search results snippets. Even though Google sometimes uses the description meta tag for the snippets it shows, it still doesn’t use the description meta tag in its ranking.

It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored keyword tags for years and currently there is no change to that policy.

Many of my clients continue to ask me for more ways to generate new business online.  While many of the things we focus on are traffic building and analysis, another key thing many of our clients can be doing better is drip marketing and building an effective newsletter campaign to people that have shown continued interest in your products or services.

Here is my own suggestion to begin building your list people that have opted to receive further communication from you on an ongoing basis.

4 Steps To Success With Your Email Marketing

1. Begin collecting peoples names and addresses by asking people to signup for your branded newsletter from your website itself.  Here are 2 ways we do it on our own site:

2. Ensure that you are signed up to an email marketing service that allows you to both send emails safely and allows for complete measurement of your email marketing campaigns.  We just happened to launch our newest email marketing product a few weeks ago.  Check out WHICHABAM! here!

3. Setup the forms on your website to automatically send the information of people that have opted in straight to the list you have setup in your email marketing program.

4. Newsletter Creation

• • Develop a theme or brand behind your monthly newsletter approach.  We have developed a tagline called ‘Rise To The Top’ and the content of our email marketing is generally in the form of helpful tips from the industry.
  • Determine the frequency with which you will send.  Daily? Weekly?  Monthly? Quarterly?  What ever you decide make sure you stay consistent!
  • Once your theme is developed make sure you have a template that is going to get read.  Our own research shows that it is important not to over design your template.  Instead make it about the content.
  • Make sure that your newsletter offers recipients a way to ‘Opt-out’ if they choose to.
  • Start sending!

We also advise you to turn that wonderful email newsletter into a blog and post it to your website.  This helps build further credibility with search engines and keeps those not signed up to your email newsletter updated!

Not only is sending email campaigns important in keeping interested parties thinking about your company, it is also an incredibly affordable way to keep people up to date and interested in what you do!