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Everything You Need To Know About Robots.Txt And Its Importance To SEO

Everything You Need To Know About Robots.Txt And Its Importance To SEO

April 10, 2023 /

Within the considerable subject of SEO and its implementation, two main facets can be focussed upon. One is the creative element which covers aspects of SEO such as content creation, accessibility, and some parts of user experience (UX).

The second aspect is technical SEO, and, as its name suggests, it deals with much of the work you will not usually see such as coding, metadata, and the structure of the website.  Technical SEO includes elements that ensure a website is indexed which is essential for it to appear in the search engines, and also for it to be crawled so that its ranking can be determined. The element within a website’s coding that ensures this happens is ‘robots.txt’ so let us look at this in more detail.

What Is ‘robots.txt’?

Before we go any further, we must clarify that robots.txt has nothing to do with Androids or any artificial intelligence tool. Instead, it is a few lines of text within the source code of a website that instruct search engines which pages of that website they can and cannot crawl. The robots.txt acts like a signpost showing the search engine bots to the correct pages and away from the wrong pages. It also lets the bots know how often they should return to crawl the page.

How Does ‘robots.txt’ Work?

The bots and spiders the search engines send out have two main functions. The first is to crawl the internet to discover content, and the second is to index that content so that the search engines can create search results whenever a user types in a search term.

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Website Traffic

Monitor Your Website Traffic – Search Engine Marketing

January 27, 2023 /

An online business website that depends on promotion and sales needs a good search engine marketing strategy to be successful and profitable. Generating targeted traffic to the website is the main function of a search engine marketing strategy.

A variety of different traffic building methods and techniques can be used to attract traffic to a particular website. One such widely used methods of search engine marketing that is used by online businesses to generate traffic is “pay per click”. Pay per click is an acceptable method used to attract traffic to your websites, however it is important to monitor it frequently to determine its efficiency in generating traffic that is beneficial to the project.

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Is SEO Still Relevant What It Is and Why It Matters

Is SEO Still Relevant? What It Is and Why It Matters

April 5, 2022 /

If you run a business, you want the dollars you spend to attract customers to be as effective as they can be. Back in the day, that might have been a little simpler. Advertising and marketing to build your brand was done in print publications, via networking and word of mouth referrals. But the internet, social media and search engines changed all of that.

All of a sudden, a working knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) seemed to be required to get any good results from your website. But is that true in 2020 like it was five years ago? Let’s find out.

First Things First: What is SEO

First of all, let’s be clear about what we mean when we say SEO. Most websites get the majority of their traffic from Google. Even if you don’t go to ‘Google.com’ if you use a search bar on an iPhone or an Android-powered phone, then that search bar is also powered by Google.

Here’s what most people don’t realise though. The ‘search results’ that appear after you put in a query like ‘dentist in Sydney’ is different for every single person. It’s based on the specific data that Google has about each of its users based on their estimated age, gender, previous searches, location, social media and a whole host of other things.

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Law Firm Marketing Strategy

How Can I Develop a Complete Online Law Firm Marketing Strategy?

February 8, 2019 /

Developing a complete online marketing strategy is important for pretty much all businesses, including law firms. For a law firm such as Perth based Culshaw Miller, having a complete digital marketing strategy will help you direct your marketing efforts, will help you identify your weak points, and will help you gain a competitive edge on other firms in your area.

Unfortunately, not all law firms make good use of their digital marketing budget. Money is wasted on inefficient or out-dated types of marketing, which means that results are well below what they could be. If you would like to get the most out of your law firm’s digital marketing budget, then keep reading!

Why Do We Need A Marketing Strategy?

This is one of the most common questions that we get asked by law firms. Well, the answer is simple:

“Without a clear marketing strategy, you won’t be able to direct spending to the right places. Your marketing budget will probably be wasted to some extent, and you won’t be getting maximum return on investment.”

Any large scale process involving the expenditure of money needs some sort of plan. When it comes to online marketing, a clear, comprehensive digital marketing strategy is the best way to plan.

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Local SEO Company

Why Employing A Local SEO Company Makes Sense For Your Business

November 11, 2018 /

Improving the ranking of your website can play a huge part in the success of your local business, but it takes specialist skills to achieve it. Trying to do it yourself might seem worthwhile, but it can cost you a lot in terms of time and money. The wisest course of action is to employ a local SEO agency or company who have the skills and resources to implement an effective search engine optimisation campaign for you.

The first advantage of using a local SEO agency might not seem obvious, as you will likely have to pay them a fee upfront, but doing so will reduce your costs. The reason is that each element of an SEO campaign will require a specific expert whose work you would have to pay for. If you are contracting each individual piece of work to a different agency or company each time, the costs will be huge.

By comparison, employing an agency who will oversee all the work, means the overheads will be greatly reduced, as most of the work can be done by the staff which the agency employs. Even if they must outsource some of the work, they will be able to secure the services of experts with whom they may have negotiated a special rate due to the volume of work they are generating for them.

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Adwords-Marketing-Fewer-Keywords

How to Manage Adwords Marketing with Fewer Keywords

October 27, 2017 /

adwords-account-structureWhile adwords marketing is often a great way to get traffic and conversions in your business, it often becomes overwhelming for the newcomer to manage, especially when you have a great many keywords. You can have better success for less cost using just 10 exact match keywords if you take into account these few tips.

  • Choose short tail keywords for your digital marketing campaign.
  • Advertise on Bing. The keywords you use for marketing, will cost less and you won’t start a bidding war because many advertisers stay in the Yahoo environment.
  • Segment your campaigns by state/region/city/zip codes as this allows you to use more instances of the same keywords. It also helps you to track more easily which keywords are performing best for each area.
  • Use standalone campaigns to test things like ad text and landing pages.
  • To make your ads different and push the competition down, use all the extensions you can. This can also increase your quality score (QS) rating.

 

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Web Analytics

Things Web Analytics Can Teach You

September 25, 2016 /

For the purpose of SEO, you need to always be on the look out for the keywords that can bring in lots of traffic. However, it does not end there. What you also need to understand is, which keywords bring in more traffic, as well as conversions for you?

Unless you get visitors to become customers, to get huge traffic would be of no use. You should analyze, what gets you more visitors and also ensure that your sales are completed with them. This is where web analytics can be of immense help to you. You can literally listen to what your customers are saying by using web analytics tools, which are available.

The web analytical tools and test can give you the most valuable information about visitors. You can get a peek at their browsing and searching behavior.

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Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing Strategy

April 15, 2016 /

With growing technology, it has become easier to find any and everything on the Internet and the search engines play a vital role in helping people find relevant information.

Most Businesses have set up their websites and try to have their sites ranked high in the natural results of searches that are displayed to searchers.

This will bring the maximum exposure possible, and the ability to attract plenty of potential customers/clients.

The SEO’s job as we all know is to determine the keywords frequently used by visitors, but SEO alone is not enough. You need to conduct marketing efforts online that are aimed at increasing the traffic and conversion.

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URL rewrite technologies

Mod Rewrite shopping carts for SEO

November 30, 2015 /

Many websites use URL rewrite technologies to make the URL’s friendly to the search engines.

Also known as a mod_rewrite, it has been described as “the Swiss Army Knife of URL manipulation”!

However, not all rewritten URL’s are the same. Some people rewrite URL’s to simply remove the (?) and (&) from the resulting URL. However, this does not provide the best form of rewritten URL.

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Effective Pay Per Click landing pages

Effective Pay Per Click landing pages

March 1, 2015 /

A landing page is the first page on your website that a potential customer will see when they click on your Google or Yahoo pay per click ad.

This page needs to be designed to convert the maximum number of visitors/leads.

Your landing pages should be professionally designed and should immediately confirm for the visitor that they will find what they came looking for by including the query term in the title and heading of the page.

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Utilizing Different Personality Types In Business

October 10, 2014 /

We’re all beautiful and unique snowflakes, are we not? We all have special skills to bring to the table, each of us good at one thing, none of us better at everything. Online marketing blog TopRank has a post on fitting all those snowflakes into one useful corporate snowman. Don’t you love that analogy?

It raises some interesting parallel discussions about how one could use customer’s personality types to market more efficiently. The Dominant customer could be sold with “Our product will help you conquer the world.” The Influential customer could be sold with “Get things done with our product.” The Steady customer could be sold with “Our product is the same tried, tested, and true solution you’ve come to expect.” And the Conscientious customer could be sold with “Our product is made with quality in mind.” Read more website strategies.

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Article Marketing

Article Marketing – A Major Internet Marketing Strategy

February 15, 2014 /

Article marketing will let you establish yourself as an expert in your field, provide your site with increased traffic and lead to better search engine ranking for your site. Whatever be your area of expertise, you can be sure that there exists an audience, who is interested to learn more from you and there are many publishers, who are on the look out for low cost or free content.

However, simply writing and submitting articles that lack quality content is a waste of time and effort. Your articles provide you with an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your field. You therefore need to write like an expert. It is the best articles that fetch the best results.

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Google + Benefits

Five Reasons Why Your Business Profile Belongs On Google+ Rather Than Facebook

October 29, 2013 /

1. Having your website linked from your Google+ profile gives it search credibility.

Simple fact. Plus if your business sells widgets, and you post to your Google+ account about your widget blog, and your location is known to Google, then when users search for widget merchants in your area, your site or your account will pop up closer to the top.

2. There’s fewer distractions on Google+.

Some users might compare Facebook and disdain the lack of things like having a “favorite music” or “books you’re read” section. But really, what does that do? Google+ also removed games, and has a general lack of gizmos entirely. That’s a good thing. There’s less noise, more room for you, yourself, to shine.

3. Google+ has superior market targeting.

Because Google+ has Communities, Hangouts, and Pages, all of them excellent opportunities to make connections through your product. Keep an eye out for communities that target your market, and be sure to post there. Make a few extra pages detailing your products and services. Host hangouts within your target market’s niche.

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Can Advertisers Still See The Forest For The Trees?

December 7, 2012 /

A fascinating and soul-searching read at hand over at the Central Desktop Blog, on The evolution of the ad campaign. It talks about how moving the marketing industry into the web age has led to some advantages, but some disadvantages as well. The interesting point is the lack of “big ideas”.

We don’t see those really inspired advertisers that capture our interest. Instead, everything kind of blends into a slick, over-produced corn mush, with hardly any commercial distinguishable from product to product. Take this away – advertising is all about getting your potential customer to remember your product. If your marketing strategy doesn’t stand out in any particular way, your product won’t either.

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Penguins and Pandas and Pagerank, Oh My!

August 8, 2012 /

We’re downright nostalgic for the good old days when SEO work didn’t involve so many animal names. here’s the latest breakdown on Google Panda vs Google Penguin and what they mean to you. It’s a great resource and you should read it carefully, because there’s a lot of half-baked theories and general panic going on out there and this post is a smooth voice of reason.

Let’s try to view the Google Penguin update rationally: Keywords are not dead. Even Google’s own webmaster guidelines advise “Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.” That’s all you have to do. Deep breaths, everybody. We’ll get through this. Continue reading

He’s Right, This YouTube Ad Is Compelling!

May 3, 2012 /

You know what your goal should be with marketing? To make your advertisement so interesting that the user forgot that it wasn’t why they came there in the first place.

This post on Content Marketing Done Right is a good example. There’s one of those ads on YouTube – where you normally sit there waiting for the ‘skip ad’ button to pop up. Except, saith Chris Brogan, this ad is produced so well and hooks you so thoroughly that it’s tough to stop watching it.

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Google Ratings Guidelines

December 7, 2011 /

SEOMoz modestly states “If you’re looking for SEO secrets, you’ll be disappointed by this post.” Oh, we beg to differ. While it isn’t exactly Earth-shattering or surprising, we found this list of 16 Google Ratings Guidelines to be worth passing along, just because it’s obvious that many of you out there do not know them.

Take for example:

  • Generic Queries Are Never Vital – So why are there so many web entrepreneurs out there fighting tooth and nail over domains like “beer.com” and “vacations.org”? Sorry to break this to you, but most of us expect to find a rather unhelpful domain at a generic.com address, and we’re usually right.
  • Copied Content Can Be Relevant – That’s startling! We’ve had so much bad press about copied content drilled into our skulls that we’re going to avoid it anyway.
  • Ads Without Value Are Spam – Not news to you and I, but breaking headlines to a ton of landing pages out there. We’re guessing they’re all owned by people in third-world countries who haven’t gotten the news.
  • Google Raters Use Firefox – Yay! Not only our favorite browser, but our favorite add-on gets a plug too!

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Strange Search Engine Ruling By United States Judge

November 27, 2011 /

In Nevada, USA, a judge has made an unusual ruling regarding search engines. To say the least.

See, Chanel (a fashion and beauty company) was in a fit because counterfeit websites are ripping off their good name. Fair enough. Then they had a court ruling to seize all of the domains (raising an eyebrow here, but possibly justified). But then the judge also ordered “all Internet search engines including, but not limited to, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and all social media websites including, but not limited to, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter” to remove any index listings for the counterfeit pages.

Uh, your Honour? I’m sure your desk in Nevada doesn’t have jurisdiction outside the USA, so what good will this do at all? You’ve heard of a little company called “Yandex”? It’s kind of in Russia…

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Is Google Getting Blamed More Than It Should?

October 3, 2011 /

It’s hard to believe that we’re still hearing about Panda. It seems as old as Y2K now. Yet here we are looking at another story about a webmaster sore at Google over it. Search Engine Watch gives us a refreshing reality check: Maybe a site drops in Google’s SERPS just because its junk?

There’s also, at the bottom of the article, a handy list of things to check when your site rankings drop. It’s good to keep in mind that sometimes webmasters throw themselves into a panic when they don’t have to. We’ve seen web-workers at lunch with a laptop: They order lunch, hit F5, pay the cashier, hit F5, take a seat, hit F5, and they go “Whoa! We dropped three places!” and out the door they run while we watch their sandwich get cold, or until somebody eats it.

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Will Google+ Lead The Way For Erasing Anonymity On The Web?

September 3, 2011 /

Search Engine Land reports on Google’s latest move in its attempt to horn into the social networking banquet, where they’re going to start verifying an account identity. The chatter about this one is, surprisingly, more positive than you’d expect. While there are still concerns about online privacy, it seems that web users are sick of something else even more:

Trolls, scams, spammers, sock-puppets, and general fools using the whole wide world for their personal playground.

It is true that the state of the web as we know it does lend itself to a hostile environment. Take the case of David Mabus, a Canadian who made a career out of sending thousands of threatening emails and IMs to everyone he saw on the web for more than ten years. He has just now been arrested. If you were on any side of an issue opposite him, chances are you were threatened under one of his many accounts.

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