SEO and The Bots

SEO is an important facet to an online business-and it is always a work-in progress. Yes, keywords in your content, and keyword rich meta tags are relevant to the content. But without making your site search engine friendly, as well as, safe against the bad search engines-you may have a rude awakening.

When the search engines crawl your site, they will check into your robots.txt file -- seeing if they have permission to enter your site, as well as, seeing what pages they should not index.

In addition, the robots.txt file will help you to tell certain friendly search engines not to enter specific pages that you do not want indexed. Then there are other search engines that do not follow the rules, hog precious bandwidth, and possibly steal your traffic. Yes there are friendly (good) robots and bad robots. So what do you do with the bad robots that don't obey the robots.txt file?

You should set up a .htaccess file to instruct the bad search engines to stay away. Some bad bots have no manners, and will take all your website has to offer, be it, your emails, images, content and traffic. So, how do you get the bad robots to stop? You can utilize the .htaccess file to block the bad search engines from entering your site.

Sounds easy, but remember, the bad search engines will use different names to crawl your site, so you have to be ever vigilant - if you don't want to lose traffic. If you're not familiar with the .htaccess file or how to set it up -- go to Clockwatcher's for a nice tutorial on the subject.

To conclude, although keywords and content are extremely important, so are the mechanics of keeping your site search engine friendly and protected. So if you don't want to lose traffic, and thus, money- you might want to get a handle on these two helpful files.

Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz for free tools, articles, ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories, software and computers for the online business. Or check her blog – My Affiliate Place Blog http://myaffiliateplace.blogspot.com/

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