More on SEO and Bots

SEO and the bots? What do you mean. SEO and SEM encourage the bots to visit your site. Which you do want. But you also need to realize that with the good comes the bad. The good bots behaves nicely on your site. But the bad bots, can scrape your site, harvest your emails, steal your traffic and hog your bandwidth. So how can you make, or try to make the bots behave nicely on your site? Through behind the scene programs that instruct the bots on how to behave.

My article "SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines" gives you an intro of setting your site up to protect yourself from the bad bots and to encourage the good bots to enter. But remember, a bad bot can be defined differently by a webmaster. But if you find your traffic suddenly disappearing and it's not due to any changes in how Google, Yahoo or MSN are spidering your site, then just maybe, you may have some bad bots stealing your hard work.


SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines
By Vickie Scanlon

SEO is always a work-in-progress-and one that should be learned. Most people know about putting keywords in their content, and making their meta tags available and relevant to the content. But is there anything else to consider. Of course! You need to make your site search engine friendly, as well as, safe against the bad search engines.


SEO and Robots.txt and .htaccess

When the search engines crawl your site, they will check into your robots.txt file -- seeing if they have permission to enter your site, as well as, seeing what pages they should not index.

In addition, the robots.txt file will help you to tell certain friendly search engines not to enter specific pages that you do not want indexed. Then there are other search engines that do not follow the rules, hog precious bandwidth, and possibly steal your traffic. Yes there are friendly (good) robots and bad robots. So what do you do with the bad robots that don't obey the robots.txt file?

You should set up a .htaccess file to instruct the bad search engines to stay away. Some bad bots have no manners, and will take all your website has to offer, be it, your emails, images, content and traffic.

So, how do you get the bad robots to stop? You can utilize the .htaccess file to block the bad search engines from entering your site.

Sounds easy, but remember, the bad search engines will use different names to crawl your site, so you have to be ever vigilant - if you don't want to lose traffic. If you're not familiar with the .htaccess file or how to set it up -- go to Clockwatcher's for a nice tutorial on the subject.


SEO and Your Site Map

A site map is really important if you have a large site. Why? If a search engine has
a difficult time crawling your site, they will look to your site map for help. It's nice that they have another alternative to getting your site completely indexed.


SEO and Alt Tags

Make sure that you label your images. By using the alt tag within your html code for your images, you can tell the search engine what the image is about. Although you may know about the alt tag, sometimes, I included, have a tendency to forget to utilize it. Not only does the alt tag help the search engines to identify what is on your web page and what the image is about, but it also helps those that are blind.

To conclude, although keywords and content are extremely important, so are the mechanics of keeping your site search engine friendly and protected. Small sites may feel they do not need to protect their content. But if you have any ranking at all, the search engines will seek you out, good and the bad. And it is the bad search engines that can steal your content your traffic, and your bandwidth. So, don't ignore or fear the robots.txt and .htaccess process, your website can take a hit that can cost you money.


Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, articles,ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories, security software and computers for your home office or online business.