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Although for professional search engine optimisation consultants the notion for robots.txt is very familiar, for those who have just began their journey into the world of search engine optimisation it might not be so clear. Basically, a robots.txt will tell search engine spiders coming to crawl your website about the directories and files that you want to be indexed from your website. Therefore, a wrongly used robots.txt might actually have a huge impact on the evolution of your website. You could make it difficult or even impossible for search engine robots to crawl your website simply by a mistake in your robots. Txt.

Why use robots.txt? Here are the reasons why you should use robots.txt: – to signal search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. – to prevent indexing totally. You can exclude certain areas of your site from being indexes. – to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.

Creating your robots.txt Robots.txt is a simple file that you can edit in Notepad and after save in the root directory of your site, where you also have your home page.

Each entry for your robots.txt has to contain two lines: User-Agent: [Spider/ Bot name] Disallow: [Directory/ File Name]

According to your reason for using robots.txt, here is how you can put it together:

1. If you want to exclude a file from an individual Search Engine:

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /private/privatefile.htm

2. If you want to exclude only a section of your site from spiders:

You do not need to specify each robot that you wish to exclude anymore, because you can simply use a wildcard character, ‘*’, which will lead to its immediate exclusion. User-Agent: * Disallow: /newsection/

3. If you want to allow search engine spiders to index everything:

Using the same wildcard, ‘*’, you signal that all spiders are welcome to crawl your entire site. Remember you need to leave the second line, disallow, empty, that is your disallow from nowhere.

User-agent: * Disallow: Once you got your robots.txt in place, you need to make sure they have been done correctly. The tool to use for this is Google Webmaster Tool. As we have talked about in a previous blog (Create your Search Engine Marketing Strategies by Using Google Webmaster Tool), one of the features offered by this tool allows you to check your robots.txt. Basically, Google will automatically and in real time retrievethe robots.txt from your website and adds the main url to the list of urls that should be checked.

As search engine optimisation consultants, we would recommend you pay very much attention to the way you are using this due to their great impact on your search engine marketing strategy. They can help your site in getting higher visibility from search engine spiders, but can also be quite destructive if done wrongly.

If you would like to share your experience in using robots.txt or would like to add to our list other tips that might help in the creation of robots.txt, we would love to read your comments!

SysComm International is a social media marketing, online reputation management and search engine marketing company. Click here to contact us. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.

Posted under SEO

Images can not only make your website visually attractive, they also help you gain more daily search engine traffic. Google Image Search is the version of Google dedicated to images and it is a very effective technique for your search engine marketing strategy and implicitly for your search engine optimisation strategy. Google Image Search has billions of images available from websites that have been already indexed. According to Hitwise UK, Google Image Search gets more traffic than supposed major search engines in the UK, which gives it a huge potential for your search engine optimisation as a source of traffic for your site.
For a business trying to integrate search engine marketing strategies as to improve their search engine optimisation, the use of Google Image Search is very effective. If done correctly, the optimisation of your images can bring a number of advantages:

* it can drive traffic and bring a great number of visitors to your website,

* it helps define your overall page theme.

However, there are guidelines one needs to follow to get his image on Google Image Search. There is no possibility to use search engine submission as to submit your image to Google, as with websites. That is because results are entirely shown by Google’s algorithm after robots have indexed the complete websites with images. Google’s imaging spider is called Google Image Bot. It crawls the web and indexes all of the pages it can find. Since it cannot ’see’ images, so it only takes them based on a number of factors:

1. Descriptive Image Name.

2. Compliant Images.

3. On Page Optimization.

4. PageRank and Backlinks.

5. Website Relevancy.

6. Image Storage.

These are the guidelines for Google-sensitive image reference one should follow -

1. Make your image file name keyword rich – include the keywords you want to rank high in the file name and make the folder accessible to robots.

2. Alt tags should have keywords – Alt tags are designed to provide alternative text when images cannot be displayed. They should describe what the image is about.

3. Put your keywords in the image title tag – It is shown when the user hovers over the image.

4. Add target keywords in the text close to the image -Surround your image with related text for robots to give high ranking.

5. Optimize your page for the keywords – Include the keywords in the title tags, meta tags and header tags. It is important that you have a high keyword density on the page that the image is on.

6. Re-upload images – Uploading same pictures in a gap of few months helps in maintaining search freshness for robots.

7. Make your images large – many people search large size images when they use google images. Also a high-resolution image works better than low resolution.
Use Google Image Labeller, it’s a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.

If you have used Google Image Search in your online marketing strategy or are planning to use it as part of your search engine marketing and search engine optimisation strategy, we would love to hear your thoughts!

SysComm International is a social media marketing, online reputation management and search engine marketing company. Click here to contact us.

Posted under Social Media Marketing

Using Twitter as integrated part of a social media strategy is an imperative! However, to use it effectively, a business needs to invest time in managing their Twitter strategy. There are a number of applications that allow scheduling your tweets as to make your life easier. Although their number increases every day, we have compiled a list of best 5 applications.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is my favourite application for scheduling Tweets. It is very easy to use and reliable. Some of its features are:

- tweet schedule based on date and hour,
- allows the use of multiple Twitter profiles with multiple editors each,
- integrated Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm status updates
- track statistics, RSS their content,
- vertical columns, drag-and-drop functionality and embeddable columns contribute to HootSuite’s intelligent, intuitive layout

2. Cotweet
In the CoTweet Cohort advisory panel you can find brand names such as Ford, Pepsi, Best Buy, JetBlue, Sprint, and Microsoft. Designed to help businesses maximize their Twitter ROI, it offers a more sophisticated CRM solution allowing companies to:
- manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard (up to six accounts),
- support multiple editors for each account,
- track conversations, assign roles and create follow-up tasks,
- tweet scheduler for any date and time,
- monitor keywords and trends,
- conversation threading and on duty notifications,

3. Taweet

Taweet (beta) is a social calendar and event promotion application for Twitter launched in 2009. The application offers an effective way to manage your Twitter accounts:
- events Widget : solution for displaying upcoming events on your website or blog and sharing them on Twitter,
- multiple Account Management
- intuitive User Interface: a familiar user interface where you can create and manage your Future Tweets and also view your Twitter stream, replies and messages
- threaded Discussion
- social Calendar & Events: displaying all of the Future Tweets that you create.

4. Future Tweets
Future Tweets is a great simple service, which saves a lot of time and works for businesses who want to tweet. It allows you to:
- schedule reoccurring tweets,
- no multiple account management,
- use short links and set a time and date for them,

5. Tweet Funnel
If you are looking to generate more consistent and relevant content for your audience by engaging more of your staff in the tweeting process, Tweet Funnel is your type of application.
- supports multiple user types – administrators, publishers and contributors,
- standard built in tweet scheduler,
- contributors’ tweets can originate from a Web client or a mobile device.
These are few of the most useful applications that allow you to schedule your tweets in advance. If you need professional help in creating and managing your business’ online presence on Twitter, SysComm International is offering you their Twitter Marketing services!

SysComm International is a social networking company, online reputation management and search engine marketing company. Click here to contact us.

Posted under Social Media Marketing