When it comes to optimizing your website for the search engines, you may think that all you need to do is to write compelling content and build links. However, there are a couple of other often overlooked aspects of search engine optimization that are actually vital to your success with search engines: optimizing your robots.txt file and your site map. In this brief guide, we’ll take a look at both of these important aspects of SEO and provide some tips for properly optimizing your website.
What is a Robots.txt File?
A robots.txt file is an important part of your website. It is used to tell search engine bots or crawlers (also called spiders) which pages of your website they are allowed to index and which ones they are not. The file controls who can see parts of your website but also helps the search engines to know where to look on your site. Without a robots.txt file, your website could potentially produce duplicate content or could be hard for search engines to crawl and index. You do in fact, have some control over these things if you know how to use your robots file.
When you want a search engine to crawl your website for updates, your robots.txt file is the file that lets you set those limits on what can and can’t be indexed through the search engines. This means that if you don’t want a particular page on your website to be indexed or if you don’t want it to be found by search engine bots, then you can simply add a line in your robots.txt file for the search engines to ignore that page.
Creating a Robots.txt File
Creating a robots.txt file is pretty straightforward. You can simply open a text editor and create a new file called “robots.txt”. You then need to use this simple format to add rules for the search engines to follow:
User-agent: [name of the search engine]
Disallow: [path to the page to block]
Here’s an example:
User-agent: Google
Disallow: /path-to-pagetoblock.html
This tells the Googlebot to ignore this particular page on your site when indexing your pages. The User-agent line is required, but you can also include comments using the ‘#’ character.
What is a Site Map?
A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website that is used to help search engines quickly and easily know what pages are available on your site. Without a sitemap, the search engines would need to manually follow all your links to find and index your pages, and that can take a long time if you have a very large site. Search engines also use the sitemap to locate new content for indexing and to help them determine what type of content is on your site.
Creating a Sitemap
Creating a site map is also very easy. There are many online tools you can use to automatically produce a sitemap for your website. If you are more of a hands-on person and like to do things yourself, you can also create your own custom sitemap file using an XML format.
This is what a sitemap file may look like:
Sample XML Sitemap
“`
http://www.myblog.com/
1
daily
http://www.myblog.com/page2.html
0.8
monthly
“`
The ‘loc’ tag is the URL of the page to include in the sitemap, the ‘priority’ tag is used to tell the search engines how important the page is compared to the others and the ‘changefreq’ tag is used to tell the search engines how often to check for updates on that particular page.
Summary of Optimizing your Robots.txt File and Sitemap
Creating and properly optimizing your robots.txt file and sitemap are two important but often overlooked aspects of search engine optimization. A properly optimized and updated robots.txt file can help you ensure that the search engines bots are indexing the right pages on your site, and a site map can help you ensure the search engines are finding and indexing all your pages. Taking the time to properly create and optimize your robots.txt file and sitemap can pay off in the long run with greater search engine visibility for your website.