What I am talking about is “robots.txt”. This is a text file that is uploaded to the root of your website and works with the search engines.
 

Now, you don’t have to have Robots on your website; but not having this file may cause some issues. Let’s say you have duplicate pages in your site – one for viewing and the other one for printing. You may not want the search engines to index both pages because this could impose a penalty for duplicate content. You also probably wouldn’t want your print page to be indexed, as it would have nothing referring back to your website on it.
 

A robots.txt file tells the search engines the pages that you don’t want them to visit on your website. For the most part the good search engines will obey what you ask them to do.  There are some rogue search engines out there that will bypass the robots.txt file, so if you have some sensitive data on your website, you need to lock them up.

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What is a “meta description tag”? It is a brief and concise summary of your content within your web page that can be used for search engines or directories. This description should be relatively short.
 

Using meta description tags can provide the opportunity to influence your web page in search results, but does not play a big role in the SERPs. The description tag also does not play a key role in your website ranking, but by leaving this small element out it may cause your website to be listed lower than your competition within a search query.
 

Listen to what Matt Cutts from Google has to say about meta description tags and then you decide for yourself.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are continuing to make changes in the way a search is interpreted to bring back their result. There are more companies’ website not showing up in the SERPs due to these changes that are being made.

Why? More than likely your website was developed with single keywords and not keyword phrases or long tail keyword searches.
 

As I have said before, in some of my past blog posts, good enriched keyword content (and a lot of it) is the new way search engines will position your website in their SERPs. They are calling this new search behavioral searching. Read the rest of this entry »

There is nothing worse than having your website delisted by the search engines. This happens on a regular basis. Once your website has been banned, it can take a while before it’s re-indexed after you’ve fixed the problem(s) with your website.
 

There are many reasons why your website can be delisted. Below are just a few of the more popular ones.

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