Product Review: RobogenWritten by Richard Lowe
Are you familiar with Robot Exclusion Standard? This is a way whereby you can inform search engines and other automated spiders (programs which scan your web sites for information) what pages and directories are not to be examined. The standard is precisely defined and a little obscure, and while not overly complicated it can be difficult to understand.There is help available, believe it or not. That obscure file called "robots.txt" no longer needs to be hand-edited. No longer do you need to type in server path names, remember robot and spider names and enter strange symbols which don't seem to make any sense. Okay, here's a quick review. The "robots.txt" file simply lists spiders that you want to prevent from listing all or part of your site. Along with each spider is list of directories and files that it is not allowed to examine. Wildcards are allowed. It's not very difficult but it is time consuming if you have lots of robots and files to specify. In addition, it's easy to misspell something and fali to achieve your goal. Now, someone has created a nice little piece of shareware called RoboGen, and it's not very expensive considering benefits that you will receive.
| | Getting Traffic to Your Website Yesterday Written by Jerry Robertson
You have spent countless hours working on perfect web site. It is live on net and you need traffic. What can you do to get traffic now? Submitting to various search engines is great for long term. However, your site may not be listed for several months, if at all.You do have some options. Several of search engines have express submissions. You can have your site listed in a week or less.Looksmart and Yahoo express submissions are $299. Looksmart has a basic submission that is $149 and you will get listed in about 8 weeks or less.All of these fees are a one time fee and there are no refunds. Alta Vista charges $39 for first URL and $24 for each additional URL every 6 months. Inktomi charges $30 for First URL and $15 for each additional URL yearly. Alta Vista and Inktomi refresh weekly, so your changes will show up quickly. I would recommend using Inktomi first. Then, I would consider Looksmart and Yahoo next. Yahoo has more traffic, but Looksmart is easier to get a higher ranking. I don't think Alta Vista is worth money. If you decide on Inktomi, pick your best URL's. Concentrate on 1-3 keywords per URL. Use these keywords 3-6 times in your page preferably near top of page. At least one of your keywords should be in title. Make sure you have meta tags and descriptions. Getting listed in Inktomi can get you top rankings in Hotbot, Msn, AOl Search, and others. These strategies have helped me obtain numerous words that have top 20 rankings. There is another traffic option to consider. Pay Per Click Search Engines(PPC) will get you targeted traffic at a specific cost. You are charged every time a customer clicks on your site. Many PPC's start at 1 cent per click. There are over 160 PPC's and growing. Many of them are very slow and you will not get much traffic from them at this time. However, there are several that will get you considerable traffic. The leader by far is Overture. It is also most expensive. However, with some work, you can get numerous targeted keywords for 15 cents or less. The minimum bid at Overture is 5 cents and you must spend $20 per month. All of PPC's have their own rules, but here are some general suggestions for success.
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