Technical SEO, Robots.txt, Sitemaps and Boobs

Glad you stuck around. Let's finish this off.

Now that your brain is overloaded I'm gonna get technical, if you can even pay attention anymore. First Google likes it when you write clean standard compliant code. Use the w3c validator to test this. The google bot likes it when you follow the rules.

Second, make sure your site is fast. Google likes fast sites because they give users a better experience, you can use Google page speed tools to test that.

Then we come to the robots dot text file that lives in your websites root directory, and tells search engines what's up. If you care at all about SEO you should know about this file. It allows you to tell the search engine to not crawl certain parts of your site that you don’t think are relevant to users. Let’s take a look at the Wordpress robots dot text file. User agent at the beginning just means all crawlers should listen to the instructions. Then the word disallow tells crawlers to stay out, Allow is just explicit instructions for crawlers to look at pages, and then there are links to sitemaps for crawlers to find.

But don’t rely completely on robots dot text if there is stuff on your site you don’t want crawled. There are a lot of rouge crawlers out there that completely disregard it. It won’t let you hide stuff on your site. If you really want to block stuff on your site, use stuff like password protection in your .htaccess file.

Next, submit a sitemap to search engines. A sitemap displays all the pages on your website in a consistent structure. It helps both visitors and search engines find everything they need on your site. You should have a version for humans and one specifically for search engines made with XML. You can submit the XML version through google Webmaster tools, and put it in the robots dot text file. If a user can’t find a page on your site, make sure to have a useful 404 page, but don’t let it get crawled.

Last, Install google analytics right away! It tracks your site traffic and how people are getting to your site. You’ll need to get a piece of javascript on your site for it to work.

And that’s it for the Codebabes SEO Virgin Course. We just wanted to give you a quick intro and honestly we’ve barely scratched the surface, was it as good for you as it was for me.