Create an ” SEO Valuable” Website

Today’s search engines, such as Google, are more focused on providing “valuable” and “relevant” information in the search results. What we mean by this is that they want to provide results or sites they think are going to be the most informative and helpful to the person performing the search. So what does this mean to us? Over all, it means we need to make sure our website is valuable and loaded with information about or related to the subject at hand. Don’t expect to receive good search rankings unless your site offers detailed information about or related to the subject matter, not just images and information about your organization, product or service. We mean quality information that would be helpful to people who are searching for information about or related to your “type” of organization, product or service. Here are a couple of examples:
•If your site is an auto seller website, you might also list helpful hints or ideas about car care for certain cars or parts, with a link or two to where the searcher could learn more about that car or even purchase parts for the car.
•If your site is designed to sell expensive products, you might also offer links to companies who provide financing for those products.
The bottom line on this topic is simple: Create a website that is designed to help your visitors find everything there is to know about your products and services by either offering the information within your website or providing links to sources of additional information. Keep in mind “One stop shop.”

The robots.txt file is used to control web spiders and other web robots on how they crawl your site. More often than not, this file is used to indicate which files and folder are NOT to be crawled, but one can also include the allowable files and folders to focus on. The robots.txt file can also used to point robots to the location of an xml sitemap.  The types of files that are excluded from crawling include content of the selected directories that might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole. For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. Such directories to exclude might be a “scripts” directory or an application/database directory.

A typical robots.txt look like the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Crawl-delay: 10
Sitemap: /public_html/sitemap.xml

There’s nothing really complicated about this file. The star next to the User-agent field indicates that the entire directory should be crawled with the exception of anything in the disallow fields. The crawl-delay field is a way to control the rate at which the spider crawl your directories, in this case once every 10 seconds maximum. The Sitemap field points to the location of the xml sitemap.

Robots.txt should not be used to make part of a site private. This method would not work because the contents of robots.txt are in clear text and available for the world to see. It’s merely a way to control the spidering of a directory.

A Step in the Right Direction for SEO
Back in the day if you wanted to know the online search volume for any word you used the Overture Keyword Selector Tool.  So why do I say “back in the day.”  Because nobody uses the Overture tool anymore.  In early 2007 the tool became unsupported and the information it provided, outdated.  Then in mid-2007 our company noticed that the tool only worked on occasion.  By the end of 2007, the tool was so unreliable we were no longer wasting our time trying to access its results.  As a matter of fact, I just typed in the Overture tool URL and realized it now redirects you to the Yahoo! Small Business page.  Wow, the tool doesn’t even exist anymore.

Sure there’s Wordtracker, but please, does anybody believe that a keyword tool that uses data collected from the metacrawler search engines, Dogpile and MetaCrawler, is accurate.  The metacrawlers only represent approximately 1% of search.  What do they know about Google?  Then there are the services you have to pay for, which are OK, but I wonder how accurate the data they provide is.  I’m the kind of guy that wants to see the data from the source.  Plus it was nice that the Overture keyword tool was free.

So what do SEO’s have to rely on these days for keyword search volume?  You guessed it: Google.  The Google Keyword Tool has been around for a long time, but it’s always rated search volume with a little bar, filled with green ink, that I had to imagine was on a scale from 1-10.  The problem was that even though I could guess a keyword’s position on the scale (i.e. 3 or 4), I still didn’t know what that position actually meant in terms of search volume.  Now I do, and I was right to be to question the results.  For those of you that haven’t figured it out yet, the Google keyword tool now returns the search volume of a word instead of a bar with partially filled green ink.  The information it provides is great, but it’s really been an eye opener.  Like I suspected, the old partially filled bar system inaccurately reported results.  Take the word “SEO” for example.  Under Google’s old system, “SEO” returned a fully filled green bar.  I used to interpret this to mean 10 in terms of a scale from 1-10.  Now Google’s tool says that its average monthly search volume is 1,000,000 searches.  Now look at the phrase “SEO Tools,” which I believe was also a 10 (or very near) before the switch.  According to the Google tool, “SEO Tools” is searched approximately 18,100 times per month.  Big difference, huh.

That being said, I’m glad to see Google now reporting search the way they are.  The data is a lot more meaningful and a lot more helpful.  Sure Google’s data may be inaccurate at times, but I’ll bet it’s better than the alternatives.