Contact Information -- You must have a means for visitors to contact you clearly posted on your web sites. If there's a problem and your visitors can't get in touch with you, you could lose them forever.

Spell Check -- It should be common sense, but it isn't. You should spell check your web pages before you put them on your site. Nothing says unprofessional like spelling mistakes throughout your web pages.

And, for Pete's sake, look at your web pages after they're up on your site. Make sure they look way you want them to look. Remember, you want your web site to be profitable, to help your home-based business to be as successful as it can be.

Conclusion

While there are many things to consider when setting up your web site, it's worth effort.

It's absolutely necessary for you to have web space for your home-based business to succeed!

For a more detailed explanation of various aspects of web sites, and more great advice for your home-based business, please visit My Home-Based Business Advisor.

Terry Nicholls My Home-Based Business Advisor my-home-based-business-advisor.com

Copyright © by Terry Nicholls. All Rights Reserved.

For simplicity, let's assume that you are targeting only two keywords: "tourism in Australia" and "travel to Australia". Also, let's assume that you are targeting only three of major search engines: AltaVista, HotBot and Google.

Now, suppose you have followed following convention for naming files: Each page is named by separating individual words of keyword for which page is being optimized by hyphens. To this is added first two letters of name of search engine for which page is being optimized.

Hence, files for AltaVista are

tourism-in-australia-al.html travel-to-australia-al.html

The files for HotBot are

tourism-in-australia-ho.html travel-to-australia-ho.html

The files for Google are

tourism-in-australia-go.html travel-to-australia-go.html

As I noted earlier, AltaVista's spider is called Scooter and Google's spider is called Googlebot.

A list of spiders for major search engines can be found here.

Now, we know that HotBot uses Inktomi and from this list, we find that Inktomi's spider is called Slurp.

Using this knowledge, here's what robots.txt file should contain:

User-Agent: Scooter Disallow: /tourism-in-australia-ho.html Disallow: /travel-to-australia-ho.html Disallow: /tourism-in-australia-go.html Disallow: /travel-to-australia-go.html

User-Agent: Slurp Disallow: /tourism-in-australia-al.html Disallow: /travel-to-australia-al.html Disallow: /tourism-in-australia-go.html Disallow: /travel-to-australia-go.html

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /tourism-in-australia-al.html Disallow: /travel-to-australia-al.html Disallow: /tourism-in-australia-ho.html Disallow: /travel-to-australia-ho.html

When you put above lines in robots.txt file, you instruct each search engine not to spider files meant for other search engines.

When you have finished creating robots.txt file, double-check to ensure that you have not made any errors anywhere in it. A small error can have disastrous consequences - a search engine may spider files which are not meant for it, in which case it can penalize your site for spamming, or, it may not spider any files at all, in which case you won't get top rankings in that search engine.

An useful tool to check syntax of your robots.txt file can be found here. While it will help you correct syntactical errors in robots.txt file, it won't help you correct any logical errors, for which you will still need to go through robots.txt thoroughly, as mentioned above.