Web Design Discussion

To read my other posts about the robots.txt file, please visit:

What is robots.txt file?

How do you create a robots.txt file?

If you incorrectly format your robots.txt file, your web site files may not get indexed by the search engines.

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Please read What is a robots.txt file?

How to Create and Use a robots.txt file

1. Open notepad and save a file named robots.txt

2. Create records

The content of a robots.txt file consists of so-called “records”. A record contains the information for a special search engine. Each record consists of two fields: the user agent line and one or more disallow lines.

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or File Name]

Here’s an example:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This robots.txt file would allow the “googlebot”, to retrieve every page from your site except for files from the “cgi-bin” directory. All files in the “cgi-bin” directory will be ignored by the googlebot.

3. Upload the robots.txt file to your server.

Make sure you upload the robots.txt file to the root directory (same location as your home page).

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Sometimes you may not want the search engines to spider specific directories of your site because you don’t want the informationto be read by the public. You can accomplish this by creating a robots.txt file and placing those files in it.

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I always create an html site map for every site I build. It helps search engines index all the pages of your site. This is especially important if your home page does not contain a lot of text ie has a flash introduction, includes many images, uses javascript or is a
database-driven site.

The search engine spider will find all the other pages of your site (besides the home page) by following the links that link from the html site map link on the home page.

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Read Web Site Content Guidelines - Part 1 No. 1-4

5. Don’t use hidden text or links

Some site owners try to trick the search engines by hiding links in the text so visitors inadvertently get taken to another site or create hidden text to get more keywords in their html code. This will be seen by Google as spamming the search engines and your site may get penalized. If penalized your site may disappear from Google and will take a long time to get it back. Therefore stay within the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

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Whenever you optimize a web site to improve your rankings in the search engines, it’s a good idea to be familiar with the Webmaster Guidelines from Google. If you don’t follow them you may suddenly find your site penalized for using incorrect techniques. Some of these may include hidden text or links, repeating your keywords too often in your web pages or using link schemes to artificially inflate your rankings. If your site gets penalized, it may no longer appear in Google or any of Google’s partner sites.

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Themed Search Engine Directories are directories related to your niche web site or specific topic of interest. They get you highly targeted incoming links. The quality and quantity of incoming links will determine the page rank of your site. The higher the page rank the more visitors you attract to your site.

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Paid inclusion means a search engine company will charge a fee to include your web site in its search index. Most search engine companies these days now charge a fee except for Open Directory Project and Google.

Benefits of Paid Inclusion to Search Engine Directories

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Page Rank is primarily defined as the number of links that point to your site. The number and quality of links determine how quickly your page rank increases. A higher page rank will attract more visitors and potentially increase sales provided you have optimized your site design and have well written web copy.

The best links to get are one way links. These are web sites that link to your site without requiring a link to theirs. Often when you try to exchange links with another site they do not reciprocate immediately or you need to send numerous reminders before they actually do it. This is very time consuming. A better method is to submit to major and specialized search engine directories.

Types of search engine directories

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What if you want links on a web page that require different font sizes or colors?

The solution is to create multiple link styles with CSS.

To accomplish this you must use css classes:

Example 1

The text on this wedding videography page are colored white on a black background however I want the links to have a font size of 12 pixels (same as the body text) and to hover to yellow when I pass my mouse over them.

CSS


.link1 a {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 12px;
text-decoration: underline;
}
.link1 a:visited {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 12px;
}
.link1 a:hover {
color: #FFFF66;
font-size: 12px;
text-decoration: underline;
}


HTML


<span class="link2"><a href="#1">When will our wedding day videos be ready?</a></span>


Example 2

On this FAQ page I wanted the links for the questions to have a font size of 10 pixels and hover to yellow when I pass my mouse over them.

CSS


.link2 a {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 10px;
text-decoration: underline;
}
.link2 a:visited {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 10px;
}
.link2 a:hover {
color: #FFFF66;
font-size: 10px;
text-decoration: underline;
}


HTML


<span class="link2"><a href="#1">When will our wedding day videos be ready?</a></span>


Tip 1

If you have several links that are grouped together you can place the span class at the beginning of the group and the span class end tag at the end of the group ie


<span class="link2"><a href="#1">When will our wedding day videos be ready?</a><br />
    <br />
    <a href=”#2″>Why is Always & Forever Video willing to provide uncut footage copies when other prospective videographers we’ve talked with are unwilling?</a><br />
    <br />
    <a href=”#3″>Could we try to make some money providing our tape to a show like America’s Funniest Videos?</a></span


Tip 2

You can also use the div tag instead of the span tag in the example above.

Notice the link in the footer on the same page is styled differently to the other links. The font size is 10 pixels and hovers to blue which is underlined

Conclusion

Creating multiple link styles offers a lot of flexibility for the design of your web site because you can vary the type of links on one page or for several pages.