All you need to know about Robots.txt files.

Although the robots.txt file is very important if you want to have good rankings within the search engines, many web sites don’t have this file. If your website doesn’t have a robots.txt file yet you should considered getting one. However if you already have a robots.txt file, it will do no harm reading this blog to find out more tips and make sure that the file doesn’t contain any errors.

What is robots.txt?

When a search engine crawls through your site, it looks for a special file on the site. That file is called robots.txt and will tell the search engines spider which web pages of your site should be indexed and which web pages should be ignored. Therefore the robots.txt file is a simple text file, which must be placed in your root directory. For example:
http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

How do I create a robots.txt file?

As mentioned before, the robots.txt file is a simple text file. To this all you need to do is open a simple text editor to create the file. The robots.txt file consists of so called ‘records’. These records consists if two fields the user agent line and the disallow lines. The robots.txt file will allow the search engines spider of Google to retrieve every page from your site. However it will ignore any files named ‘cgi-bin’. Therefore if you leave the disallow blank, you are telling the search engine that all files may be indexed. In any case, you must enter a disallow line for every user agent record.
In conclusion to this, there are many different tips and tricks available to help you gain the best use out of your robots.txt file. If you would like any additional information see Robots.txt tips and tricks.

If you have only just come in to the market of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you may have heard the term keyword matrix being thrown about, generally without an explanation. Keyword matrix techniques have been around for along time. If you are dealing with a lot of queries, optimizing your terms in to matrix makes a lot of sense.

Below are a few aspects of the keyword matrix theory.

A matrix is an ordered list. Although a matrix can be comprised of a single vector (1, 2, 3) they are generally thought of as 2 dimensional tables of data.

In addition to this, there are two main types, passive matrix and active matrix.

The term passive matrix is something that keeps record of data relating to keywords and phrase that other people and companies are using to gain traffic and higher positioning within the search engines. For example, if you are doing a competitive analysis you can build a matrix that will gather all keywords your competitors are using within their websites pages and see which areas you can improve on. Further to this, if you are doing a query research you can also build a matrix that will map the keywords that users have used this month within the search engines, this also allows you to have an upper hand on the internet market as you have an analysis of both the competitors and the users.

An active keyword matrix is a design template. You can use this to decide where you can optimize to gain specific keywords. You can also organize the keywords by season, year, website, search engine, page or even query space. This will therefore allow you to target a query space that you feel will benefit your companies website.

Both passive and active matrixes are used by Pay per Click (PPC) specialists when analyzing keywords. Within a PPC campaign, some people can manage a PPC campaign without using matrix techniques and therefore a lot of people succeed by organic SEO without organizing their keyword data.

For example, let’s say your business is a production industry such as used cars. Not a lot of people may search for used cars, however many other companies may have something to do with this, such as buying a car etc. Therefore not targeting the right keywords could affect your websites traffic and potentially effect you’re positioning within the search engines.

Once you have started working with keyword matrix data you should see a whole new world of optimization opportunities open up for you. The process may seem a bit daunting at first and doubts may rise up but practice makes perfect. The more you write copy to keyword specifications, the better you will become at placing keywords.

Therefore I recommend that you work with a good thesaurus and should check your spreadsheet data from time to time while building your site. You may even want to make your own scoring system to help you prioritize your selected keywords. Chances are that you have been working with keyword matrix for along time, and once you have started building the spreadsheets you will be able to explore Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in new ways that you never new existed.