I was learning a few things about optimizing my websites. I am going to share with you some of what I have learnt.
Some of the common things that are either not given their due or ignored by website developers but important from a SEO (search engine optimization) perspective are;
1. .htaccess file: Yes, this is a very small file in your webserver residing where your index.html resides
search engines think lincsoftech.com and www.lincsoftech.com are two different sites. While, for you and me it is just the same site. The traffic to these are counted as traffic to two different sites, just think of the ranking effects it might have on your site in addition to the possibility of the search engines thinking that it might be duplicate content?
Ok, I get that! But how do I create this ".htaccess" file? I am not a techie? all this is too much for me!!! If these are your queries here is the answer.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Open this in notepad, replace domain.com with your domain and that's it. As simple as that.
Upload this using an FTP program to your webserver to public_html (most of us are hosting on linux/unix sites).
2. robots.txt
This is a small text file that again sits in the same directory where your index.html resides. Here is an example that you can use and should suffice for most of the websites unless you have specific requirements such as asking the spiders not to index some of the pages of your website.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /images/
Copy and paste this in notepad, save it as robots.txt
Upload using an FTP program such as Filezilla (it is free).
3. Sitemap.
Now, this one needs a bit of XML knowledge. You must be saying, aaw, come on. All this is too much. Well, here is an example for my site. Just replace my site name with yours and upload to your server. Make sure the file name is sitemap.xml
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
I hope you find this useful. Please do leave your comments.
All the best,
Srinath
