Make a robots.txt file

Like a traveler coming to a country, the Robot needs a guide — which is the robots.txt file. It’s a specific guide, though, as it’ll only tell the Robot which "cities” he shouldn’t see.

Like, if you’re at the crossroads and one of the roads leads to a private place you shouldn’t visit, there will be a NO TRESPASSING sign on the way.

A robots.txt file will prevent the Robot from going to some pages with sensitive material, private info or any other web pages that you don’t want to be found through Google search (for instance, the "shopping cart”), pages that are not important or can be negative for your rankings. And, you can direct the Robot to other, keyword-rich pages, instead.

So, if there’s something to hide, a robots.txt file is a must for your website. It helps you keep the Robot away from anything that’s not good for your Search Engine rankings. Yep, just tell him not to go here or there — and he’ll believe you.

You can make a robots.txt file yourself, though it’s rather your webmaster’s business. Here’s an example of a creative one to inspire you - http://store.nike.com/robots.txt.

What I want you to understand is the fact that the directives in this file are extremely important and can greatly influence the number of pages that will appear in search results after you make these or that tweaks. Obviously, the number of pages appearing in SERP will affect the number of pageviews and clicks you get.

That’s why you should be extremely accurate to NOT disallow indexing of the entire website (which is, frankly speaking, quite common among business owners who try to make SEO tweaks themselves). So be cautious, because even a single mistake or a wrong symbol can make the whole website disappear from a Search Engine’s index.

After you have the robots.txt file, run it through a validator to ensure it’s written correctly.

Hundreds of robots.txt validators can be found on the web. You can apply Google’s tool, or this one: http://www.invision-graphics.com/robotstxt_validator.html

As soon as the robots.txt file is correct, you needn’t worry, as it’ll only do you a lot of good, and no harm.

DO IT NOW!

Submit your website to Search Engines, or put a good link to your site, or better do both.