Since one the best free ways to drive traffic to your site is trough search engines it’s really important to have high ranks for your desired keyword(s).

This post is going to inform you on how you can easily archive your desired keywords by doing the right thing at the right moment.

Is the search volume high enough to drive traffic?

Some keywords are not worth ranking for since they are not popular and never searched for, thus those keywords are not going to benefit you any way or form. A perfect example would be “Pros and Cons of Modern Economics”.

On the other hand, there are keywords, which are almost impossible to archive, and thus you should not target them as well. For example, “Economics”.

The perfect choice would be something that is not difficult to archive and yet people are actually search for it. So the perfect choice in our example, would be “Modern Economics”

So what’s the best way to check for the keywords search volume? There are a number of tools to do so. However, most of them seem not to work now due to unknown reasons.

The best alternative would be, this Google Tool, that perfectly displays keywords search volume.

Learn from your successful competitors

Do a search for the keyword on a number of popular search engines and see who are your competitors. Once, this is done, analyze the sites. In other words determine what those sites have and you don’t. Check their backlinks, anchor texts, places where they are promoted and so on.

There are various tools available on the net to do so. Some of them are Iwebtool tools and SEO tools by SEO company.

Establish linkbacks, as your desired keywords and anchor text

The most important thing you should do whenever you desire to archive high ranks for the specific keywords you should use anchor text to help you.

“Linked Text” Anchor text is the text that you click on to activate and follow a hyperlink to another web page or another web site.

Also remember that if you are promoting your website using banners, it doesn’t help your SEO ranking it helps only your traffic stats. So the ultimate choice would be to place anchor text right under your promotional banner.

There are a lot of places to promote your resource and I am sure that you are fully aware of them. All I want to bring up to your attention is List of Forums to Announce Your Directory, which is going to help in your promotion.

In conclusion, I would like to mention that you should try to be as much ethical as possible so don’t use black hat SEO and link spamming techniques.

What is a robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a simple text file that must be placed in your root directory (http://www.example.com/robots.txt). It tells the search engine spider which web pages on your website should be indexed and which web pages should be ignored.

You can use a simple text editor to create a robots.txt file. 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. Here’s an example:

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

This robots.txt file would allow the “googlebot”, which is the search engine spider of Google, 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 googlebot.

Which new commands is Google testing?

Webmasters have found out that Google seems to be experimenting with a Noindex commands for the robots.txt file. It basically seems to do the same as the Disallow command so it’s not clear why Google is using this command.

Other commands that might be tested by Google are Noarchive and Nofollow. However, none of these commands is official yet.

How does this affect your rankings on Google?

If you accidentally use the wrong commands then you might tell Google to go away although you want them to index your pages.

For that reason, it is important that you check the content of your robotx.txt file.

How to check your robots.txt file

Open your web browser and enter www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt to view the contents of your robots txt file. Here are the most important tips for a correct robots.txt file:

1. There are only two official commands for the robots.txt file: User-agent and Disallow. Do not use more commands than these.
2. Don’t change the order of the commands. Start with the user-agent line and then add the disallow commands:
   
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /cgi-bin/
   
3. Don’t use more than one directory in a Disallow line. “Disallow: /support /cgi-bin/ /images/” does not work. Use an extra Disallow line for every directory:User-agent: *
   Disallow: /support
   Disallow: /cgi-bin/
   Disallow: /images/
   
   
4. Be sure to use the right case. The file names on your server are case sensitve. If the name of your directory is “Support“, don’t write “support” in the robots.txt file.

You can find user agent names in your log files by checking for requests to robots.txt. Usually, all search engine spiders should be given the same rights. To do that, use User-agent: * in your robots.txt file.

What happens if you don’t have a robots.txt file?

If your website doesn’t have a robots.txt file (you can check this by entering your www.yourdomain.com/robotx.txt in your web browser) then search engines will automatically index everything they can find on your site.

Checking your robots.txt file is important if you want search engines to index your web pages. However, indexing alone is not enough. You must also make sure that search engines find what they’re looking for when they index your pages.

[Source : Axandra.com]