Now that Yahoo has decided to discontinue support for the Overture keyword suggestion tool, we need an alternatives and here they are!

• Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestions
• Self SEO Keyword Popularity Tool

The main purpose of the robots.txt is to help control where the search engines go in your website; by limiting access to certain folders or files, you can help to protect your content from appearing in search results and ensure the engines only read relevant content.

A robots.txt file can make a huge impact on your WordPress blogs traffic and search engine rank, be careful not to restrict access to too many areas of your site (unless you are certain you don’t want them to appear in search results – for example tele-seminar transcripts  that are sold on your site).

Keep in mind that if you mess up the robots.txt file by blocking too much, you could lose all of your rank and much of your trafffic.

This is a sample of an SEO optimized WordPress Robots.txt file.

The basics in editing your Robots.txt are as folllows:

Allow means the engines can follow/record the specified files and folders.
Dissallow means the engines are not allowed access to files or folders.

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Gives access to the website’s root directory

Disallow: /cgi-bin
Prevents access to the cgi-bin folder used in most websites to run pearl or cgi scripts

Disallow: /wp-admin 
Prevents access to this WordPress system folder

Disallow: /wp-includes
Prevents access to this WordPress system folder

Disallow: /wp-content
Prevents access to this WordPress system folder

Disallow: somepage.htm
Prevents access to a specific page or file

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
Allows access to Google for display in image search results

#User-agent: ia_archiver-web.archive.org
#Disallow: /
Prevents the Wayback Machine from recording your websites content.  The # means the function is turned off.

For more information on Robots.txt visit WIKI or check out this article on AskApache.com.

A recent trip to the Tucson Museum of Art provided a chance to view the “Han and Beyond – The Renaissance of China: The James Conley Collection”  exhibit. Along with the pottery often expected in such exhibits were some incredible pieces of furniture made from woods most in the Western Wood are unfamiliar with.

Once back online, the search began to find out what these woods were. In the process WIKI of course came up, but the descriptions weren’t very good, so the search continued. Ignoring the WIKI related search results provided a link to  which had a page describing the different types of wood used in Chinese furniture.

By providing this free information which the search engines recognized as relevant to the website’s content, Quing Gallery drew in traffic that was interedsted in their products (Antique Furniture).

Whatever your industry, remember you never know what will make the sale unless you try, so create a draw for your target market Organically through free information on your website or Virally through free information that can be printed or emailed.

Discover A Little-Known ‘SYSTEM’ You Can Use (Right Now) To Get TOP Rankings In MAJOR Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN!

• Traffic Equalizer Levels The Playing Field!

Free web site speed test to improve website performance

• Web Page Analyzer – 0.963

Evaluate the density of the keywords on your web pages.

• Keyword Density Calculator

When used properly, trackbacks and pingbacks are an excellent way to build links and traffic to your blog, as well as building relationships with other bloggers.

• WordPress Trackback Tutorial

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

* Google Sitemap

If you don”t want MSN to display a picture of your site in the search listings use one of the following options.

Place in your robots text file:

• User-agent: searchpreview
  Disallow:

Place between your head tags:

• <meta name=”robots” content=”noimageindex,nomediaindex”/>

Webmaster resources for Google Stats, sitemap and more

• Google Webmaster Tools