Cirencester Website Design

SEO tips – Sitemap and robots.txt

Adding a robots.txt file to your server is a way of telling search engines who to index and what not to index. It is a also a great idea to add your sitemap location as well.

To create a sitemap there are many freely available you can find them by searching for “sitemap generator” but a nice simple one can be found here enter your website address and download the XML version.  You will then need to load it to the server using FTP software.  We use filezilla which is free and easy to use.

If you want to invite a search bot to index your entire website here is the code:

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# robots.txt courtesy of http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk/index.html

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Disallow: /add the forward slash followed by the directory names you want to exclude (one per line) i.e. /customer_data

Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml

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This simple code tells all search engine bots that nothing is disallowed and the location of our site map. Using a text editor (see resources) copy and paste the above and change our address to your own website

SEO tips – Geo targeting

Your website address is an indication of the geographic market place you target. A “.com” is generic and as such it is harder to position the website for a specific geography. A “.co.uk” is specific and Google will understand that the website is specifically targeted at the UK. In the same way a “.eu” would work for Europe.

The other consideration is where your website is hosted. If it is hosted in the USA, for example, Google will assume that is targeted at the US market.

Using Google webmaster tools you can specify the “geo target” but selecting an appropriate URL and hosting your website in the appropriate country helps.

Of course we take care all of this as part of the Winning Inch SEO service.