Rayna Garcia

Everybody loves “hacks.”

People keep finding hacks to make life easier. So, today I am going to share a legitimate SEO hack that you can start using right away. 

It is the “robot.txt file” that can help you to boost your SEO. This teeny-tiny text file is also called a robot’s exclusive protocol or standard. Robots.txt file is part of every website on the internet, but it gets rarely talked about. It’s a source of SEO that is designed to work with search engines.

Robot.txt file is one of the best methods to enhance your SEO strategy because:

• • It is easy to implement
  • Consumes less time 
  • Does not require any technical experience 
  • Increases your SEO

 

You need to find out the source code of your website, and then follow along with me to see how to create a robots.txt file that search engines would love.

 

What is a robots.txt file?

 

Robots.txt file is a simple text file that webmasters create to instruct web robots or web crawlers how to crawl pages on your website. Robots.txt file is a per of REP (robot’s exclusive protocol), a standard that regulates how robots crawl the website, access the index content, and serve that content to the users online. The REP also has meta robots or site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat the links such as “follow” and “unfollow”.

Robots.txt file indicates web crawlers which part of the website they can crawl and which part is not allowed to access. These crawl instructions are specified by “allowing” or “disallowing” for all user agents. Robots.txt file allows you to keep specific web pages out of Google. It plays a big role in SEO.

Search engines regularly check a site’s robots.txt file to see if there are any instructions for web crawling. These instructions are called directives.

 

Why robots.txt file is important for SEO?

From the SEO point of view, the robots.txt file is very important for your website. Using these simple text files, you can prevent search engines from crawling certain web pages from your website, they guide search engines on how to crawl sites more efficiently. It also tells search engine crawlers which web pages not to crawl.

For example, 

Let’s say Google is about to visit a website. Before it visits the target page, it will check the robots.txt file for instructions.

There are different web components of the robots.txt file. Let’s analyze them:

• • Directive – it is the code of conduct that the user-agent follows.
  • User-agent – it is the name used to define specific search engine crawlers and other programs active online. This is the first line of any group.  An asterisk (*) matches all crawlers except the Adsbot. 

 

Let’s understand this with three examples:

1. How to block only Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

2. How to block Googlebot and Adsbot

User-agent: Googlebot

User-agent: Adsbot

Disallow: /

3. How to block Adsbot

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

• • Disallow – it is used to tell different search engines not to crawl a particular URL, page, or file. It begins with a “/” character and if it refers to a directory then it ends with a “/”.
  • Allow – it is used to permit search engines to crawl a particular URL or website section. It is used to override the disallow directive rule to allow the crawling of a page in a disallowed directory.
  • Crawl-delay – this is an unofficial directive used to tell web crawlers to slow down web crawling.
  • Sitemap – it is used to define the location of your XML sitemaps to search engines. Sitemap URL is a fully qualified URL. A sitemap is a better way to indicate the crawlers which file Google can crawl.

 

Let’s understand this with the following example,

Say that Google finds this syntax:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

This is the basic format of a robots.txt file.

Let’s understand the anatomy of the robots.txt file – 

• • The user-agent indicates for which search engines the directives are meant.
  • “Disallow” directive in robots.txt file indicates that the content is not accessible to the user-agent.
  • The asterisk (*) after “user-agent” means that the robots.txt file applies to all the web crawlers that visit the website.
  • The slash (/) after “disallow” tells the crawlers not to visit any pages on the website.

 

But, why anyone would want to stop web robots from crawling their website?  After all, everyone wants search engines to crawl their website easily so they increase site ranking.

This is where you can use the SEO hack. 

If you have a lot of pages on your website, the Google search engine will crawl each of your website pages. But, the huge number of pages will take Googlebot’s a while to crawl. If the time delay is more it may hurt your website ranking. That’s because Google’s search engine bots have a crawl budget. 

 

What is a crawl budget?

The amount of time that Google spends crawling a website is called as “site’s crawl budget”. The general theory of web crawling says that the web has infinite space, exceeding Google’s ability to explore and index each URL available online. As a result, there are limits to how much time Google web crawlers can spend time crawling any single website. Web crawling gives your new website a chance to appear in the top SERPs. You don’t get unlimited crawling from Google search engines. Google has a website crawl budget that guides its crawlers in – how often to crawl, which page to scan, and how much server pressure to accept. Heavy activity from web crawlers and visitors can overload your website.

To keep your website running smoothly, you can adjust web crawling through the crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

The crawl budget breaks down into two parts-

1. Crawl capacity limit/crawl rate limit

Crawl rate limit monitors fetching on websites so that the loading speed doesn’t suffer or result in a surge of an error. Google web crawlers want to crawl your site without overloading your server. The crawl capacity limit is calculated as the maximum number of concurrent connections that Google bots use to crawl a site, as well as the delay between fetches. 

The crawl capacity limit varies depending on 

• • Crawl health 

if your website responds quickly for some time, the crawl rate limit goes up, which means more connections can be used to crawl.  If the website slows down, the crawl rate limit goes down and Google bots crawl less.

• • Limit set by the website owner in the Google search console

A website owner can reduce the web crawling of their site.

• • Google’s crawling limit 

Google has so many machines, but they are still limited. Hence, we need to make choices with the resources we have. 

 

2. Crawl demand

It is the level of interest Google and its users have in your site. If do not have huge followings yet, then Google web crawlers won’t crawl your site as often as the highly popular ones. 

Here are three main factors that play important role in determining the crawl demand:

• • Popularity

Popular URLs on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresh in the index.

• • Staleness

Systems want to recrawl documents frequently to pick up any alterations.

• • Perceived inventory

Without any guidance, Google web crawlers will try to crawl almost every URL from your website. If the URLs are duplicates and you don’t want them to be crawled for some reason, this wastes a lot of time on your site. This is a factor that you can control easily.

 

Additionally, site-wide events like site moves may boost the crawl demand to re-index the content under new URLs.

Crawl rate capacity and crawl demand together define the “site’s crawl budget”.

In simple words, the crawl budget is the “number of URLs Google search engine bots can and wants to crawl.”

Now that you know all about the website’s crawl budget management, let’s come back to the robots.txt file.

If you ask Google search engine bots to only crawl certain useful contents of your website, Google bots will crawl and index your website based on that content alone.

“you might not want to waste your crawl budget on useless or similar content on your website.”

By using the robots.txt file the right way, you can prevent the wastage of your crawling budget. You can ask Google to use your website’s crawl budget wisely. That’s why the robots.txt file is so important for SEO.

 

How to find the robots.txt file on your website?

If you think finding the robots.txt file on your website is a tricky job. Then you are wrong. It is super easy.  

This method can be used for any website to find its robots.txt file. All you have to do is to type the URL of your website into the browser search bar and then add robots.txt at the end of your site’s URL. 

One of the three situations will happen:

1. If you have a robots.txt file, you will get the file just by typing www.example.com/robots.txt, where the example will be replaced by your domain name.

For instance, for www.ecsion.com/robots.txt  I got the robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://speedtest.ecsion.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you find the robots.txt file you need to locate it in your website’s root directory. Once you find your robots.txt file you can open it for editing. Erase all the texts, but keep the file.

2. If you lack a robots.txt file, then you will get an empty file. In that case, you will have to create a new robots.txt file from scratch. For creating a robots.txt file you must only use a plain text editor such as a notepad for androids or a TextEdit for Mac. Utilizing Microsoft word might insert additional codes into the text file.

3. If you get a 404 error, then you might want to take a second and view your robots.txt file and fix the error. 

Note: if you are using WordPress and you don’t find any robots.txt file in the site’s root directory, then WordPress creates a virtual robots.txt file. If this happens to you, you must delete all the texts and re-create a robots.txt file.

 

How to create a robots.txt file?

You can control which content or files the web crawlers can access on your website with a robots.txt file. Robots.txt file lives in a website’s root directory. You can create a robots.txt file in a simple text editor like a notepad or TextEdit. If you already have a robots.txt file, ensure you have deleted the text, but not the file. So, for www.ecsion.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.ecsion.com/robots.txt. The Robots.txt file is a simple and plain text file that follows the REP (robots exclusive protocol). A robots.txt file has many rules. Each rule either blocks or allows access for a given web robot to a specified file path on that site. All files will be crawled unless you specify.

Following is a simple robots.txt file with 2 rules:

1. User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogooglebot/

2. User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Sitemap: http://speedtest.ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

This is what a simple robots.txt file looks like. 

Let us see, what that robots.txt file means:

1. The user agent named Googlebot is not allowed to crawl any URL that starts with http://example.com/nogooglebot/
2. All the other agents are allowed to crawl the entire website.
3. The website’s sitemap is located at http://speedtest.ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

Creating a robots.txt file involves four steps:

1. Create a file named robots.txt 
2. Add instructions to the robots.txt file 
3. Upload the text file to your website
4. Test the robots.txt file 

Create a file named robots.txt

Using the robots.txt file you can control which files, or URLs the web crawlers can access. Robots.txt file lives in the site’s root directory. To create a robots.txt file, you need to use a simple plain text editor like notepad or TextEdit. Use of text editors like a word processor or Microsoft will be void, as it can add unexpected characters or codes which cause problems for web crawlers. Ensure that you save your file with UTF-8 coding if prompted during the save file dialog. 

Robots.txt rules and format:

• • Robots.txt file must be named robots.txt.
  • Every site can have a single robots.txt file.
  • Robots.txt file must be located in the website’s root directory.  For example, to control crawling on all the URLs of your website https://speedtest.ecsion.com,  the robots.txt file must be located at https://www.ecison.com/robots.txt. It can’t live in the sub-directory. (for example, at https://speedtest.ecsion.com/pages/robots.txt ). 
  • Robots.txt file can be applied to the sub-domains or on non-standard ports. 
  • Robots.txt file is a UTF-8 encoded text file that includes ASCII. Google may ignore characters that are not part of the UTF-8 encoding, rendering robots.txt rules invalid.

 

Add instructions to the robots.txt file

Instructions are the rules for web crawlers about which part of the site they can crawl and which part they can’t. when adding rules to your robots.txt file keep the following guidelines in mind:

• • Robots.txt file consists of one or many groups.
  • Each group has different rules and directives, one instruction per line. Each group begins with a user-agent line that defines the target of the group.
  • A group gives the following instructions to the user-agent:
  • Who the group applies to (the user-agent)
  • Which files, URLs, or directories the agent can crawl?
  • Which files, URLs, or directories the agent cannot crawl.
  • Web crawlers process the groups starting from the top to the bottom. A user agent can match only one instruction set, which is the first, most specific group that matches a given user agent. 
  • By default, a user agent can access any URL, or file on your website unless it is blocked by the “disallow” rule.
  • Rules are case-sensitive. For example, disallow: file.asp only applies to https://www.example.com/file.asp, but not https://www.example.com/FILE.asp. 
  • “#” marks the beginning of a comment. 

 

Upload the robots.txt file

After saving your robots.txt file to the computer, you might want to make it available for the search engine crawlers. How you upload the robots.txt file to your website completely depends on your server and the site’s architecture. You can search the documentation of your hosting company or directly get in touch with them.

Once you upload the robots.txt file, perform a test to check whether it is publicly accessible or not.

Test the robots.txt file 

For testing your robots.txt markup, open a private browsing window in your web browser and navigate to the location of your robots.txt file. 

For example, https://www.example.com/robots.txt 

if you find the contents of your robots.txt file, you can proceed to test the robots.txt markup.

There are two ways offered by Google to test the robots.txt markup:

1. Robots.txt tester in search console 

This tool can be used for robots.txt files which are already accessible on your website.

2. Google’s open-source robots.txt library 

It is also used in Google search to test the robots.txt file locally on your computer.

Submit the robots.txt file

After uploading and testing your robots.txt file, Google’s search engine crawlers will automatically start utilizing your robots.txt file. There’s nothing much you need to do. 

 

Conclusion

We hope this blog has given you an insight into why robots.txt files are so important for SEO. So, if you seriously want to improve your SEO, you must implement this teeny tiny robots.txt file on your website. Without it, you will be lagging behind your competitors in the market.

 

 

What Is A Blog?

A blog is an online journal or informational website displaying information in reverse chronological order. In a blog, the latest posts appear first and the older ones automatically go down. The purpose of a blog can be personal or business. Learn here how to start a blog as blogging for business can promote your product and services if you can rank your website higher in Google searches. In a new business where you are promoting your product and services, you rely on blogging to help you get to potential customers and grab their attention. The main purpose of a blog is to connect with potential customers and boost your traffic and send quality leads to your website.

 

How To Start A Blog?

Let us discuss in detail how to start a blog step-by-step. Here you will find all the guidance and tools you’ll need to start a blog:

1. Choose a blogging platform

To create a blog choosing a blogging platform is the first step. A good blogging platform is a must for publishing your content. There are several different sites available that suit bloggers. One of them is Wix. It is most recommended because it’s a good all-around blogging platform that satisfies most needs.

 

2. Select a hosting platform

After selecting your preferred blogging platform you have to choose a hosting platform. A hosting platform stores websites on a server under a unique address so that visitors can easily reach them. Consider a platform with good bandwidth, uptime, and customer support. Some popular options are:

• • BlueHost.
  • HostGator.
  • DreamHost.
  • GoDaddy

3. Finding the right niche

If you want to start a successful blog it is very important to target specific customers through your blog. Try to write a blog keeping a specific audience in mind. Possible blog types range from fashion blogs to marketing blogs to food blogs and many more. Because there are lots of other blogs focusing on the same subjects, you’ll need a way to stand out while still writing about what you love. So, try to make a blog by narrowing down your interests and researching your audience preferences.

 

4. Select a blog name and domain

Selecting a blog name and domain is again very important when we are starting or writing a blog. You can create a blog name with your first name and last name or with your business name or you can also create a completely new one. Once you have decided on your blog name then you should choose your domain name. Typically, your domain name will be the same as, or at least influenced by, the name of your blog.

5. Set up and design your blog

Now, after getting equipped with all the basics for setting up your blog it’s time to optimize your blog design. Choose a good blog template for you and then decide which pages to include in it. Polish off your website with an attractive blog logo. The brand logo is another way to add personality to your site, and it’s an essential step if you want to start a blog that evolves into a recognizable brand.

 

6. Choose unique blog topics

Brainstorm blog topics that suit your targeted audiences. Your topic should be such that your customers develop an interest in reading it.

7. Write your first blog post

Now, you are ready to create your first blog post. Engage your audience with an attractive title and use headers to make the content skimmable. Follow these steps:

• • Start with keyword research.
  • Decide a blog title.
  • Write engaging content
  • Insert images
  • Optimize for SEO
  • Edit and publish

8. Plan an editorial calendar

Creating an editorial calendar is a good practice to ensure you publish content consistently. It will let you hold yourself accountable as a writer and will ensure that you don’t deviate from your blogging goals. Search engines also take into account how frequently you publish when determining your site’s overall ranking. So, it will be good to publish your content at regular intervals.

9. Promote your blog

After you have done everything from starting a blog to publishing it, it’s time to promote your blog. You can promote your blog by sharing it on social media, by sharing it on other websites, participating in question and discussion sites, or investing in paid advertisements. The more you promote your blog you will get more audiences for your blogs and thus you will make a good amount of money from it.

 

10. Make money blogging

When you are quite an expert in writing blogs It’s time to take advantage of opportunities to monetize your blog. You can follow these ideas for earning money through blogs:

• • Money blogging through affiliate marketing
  • Display ads within your blog
  • Offer paid subscriptions to customers
  • Writing sponsored content for companies
  • Sell e-books and merchandise through your website
  • Provide consulting services.

There is a famous saying in the business world. The customer is the actual boss. This implies that they cannot survive for long without the clients. So you need to figure out how to reach out and appeal to your target customer base. Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important when it comes to reaching out to potential clients. Almost everyone can access the internet nowadays from their smart devices. However, the digital marketplace is crowded with all sorts of vendors competing for the clients’ attention. For your business to stand out, you’ll need to be creative. Learn how to generate leads with live chat and chatbots.

Using Chatbots and live chats on the business website can help you elevate that creativity to another level. This is because the first step towards generating leads is to appeal to clients to take an interest in whatever you have to offer. And that is precisely what live chats and Chatbots will help you with. Read on for more information on how to generate leads with live chat and chatbots.

 

What is Lead Generation?

Picture yourself browsing through the customer relationship management database for the organization. You will find the contact details of a lot of people. All of these people were potential clients who willingly gave you their details since they are interested in what you are offering. 

It is your responsibility to reach out to everyone who left their contact. Any of them could be your next client. The process of following up on potential clients is what we call lead generation. It is a step-wise process that takes place in 3 stages.

Stage one involves creating an interest in the product. Then you leverage the interest you’ve created to acquire contact details from prospective clients in stage two. Finally, stage 3 involves sending the contact details to your sales team.

The sales team is responsible for following up on the prospect and turning them into clients. A lead is any person who has shown an interest in what you have to offer.

 

What are Lead Generation Channels?

There are two channels for generating leads. These are the inbound and outbound lead generation channels. In outbound lead generation, you don’t wait for prospects to approach you. You go after them proactively. This could be through face-to-face communication or ads in the print media, just to name a few. 

Inbound lead generation, on the other hand, focuses on optimizing the content of your website. The optimization intends to provide information that is valuable and attractive to your targets through blogs. Search engine optimization techniques will help you reach out to your targets via blogs. Relying on Chatbots and live chats are some examples of inbound lead generation.

Generate Leads With Live Chat And Chatbots

1. Generating Leads Using Chatbots

Chatbots are not only meant for automating chats. They are very crucial for generating leads too. Prospects are more likely to become customers when they interact with Chatbots on your site. Chatbots and live chats, in general, are suitable for elevating customer satisfaction. Here are some of the ways that Chatbots can generate leads for your business. 

 

• • Automatically Welcoming Visitors to the Site

You can configure your Chatbot to automatically greet people when they land on the site. The Chatbot should then ask if the visitor is interested in knowing more about your services. This conversation is essential because the Chatbot will attend to the visitor’s inquiries instantly. It will forward the question to a live chat operator who’ll assist if it is unable. In other cases, the Chatbot will just ask for the visitor’s e-mail address. An operator will send all the answers to the visitor’s questions afterward.

Chatbots can also welcome first-time visitors by giving them discounts. The Chatbot sends this discount in the form of a promo code to the visitor’s e-mail. The good thing about Chatbots in welcoming visitors is that they collect their contact details. Even if the customer doesn’t return, you have their contacts for further marketing purposes.

• • Assisting in Knowing your Audience Faster

Communication is the backbone of every relationship, even in business. To develop a healthy relationship, you need to know how to communicate with them. Chatbots can help you understand your prospects well by helping to identify their interests and wants. This is so because Chatbots can run engaging surveys on your clients to ascertain how they view your services. Additionally, some Chatbots are also capable of segmenting these people based on their likes. Data from the survey is critical for lead generation. The data will enable you to generate and market content that resonates most with your audience.

• • Generating Leads when Live Chat is Unresponsive

Live chat operators usually have a lot to deal with within a short period. Sometimes they aren’t in a position to attend to a prospect instantly. In such cases, prospects can develop a negative attitude towards the business. They might form an opinion that the business is snobbish towards the clients. You can’t allow this to happen.

A Chatbot is in a position to replace the live chat operator in case they are unable to respond promptly. The Chatbot will inform the prospect of the delay and then provide them with options. The options are generally for the prospect to continue waiting or leave after leaving contact information. In either case, you’ll be able to follow up on the lead later.

• • Engaging Visitors who want to leave

Expect prospects who visit your website to be impatient. If they can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave for your competitor fast. Chatbots can prevent these people from leaving by engaging them. The Chatbots will ask the prospect their reason for leaving. The Chatbot then goes ahead to provide solutions that might persuade the prospect to make a purchase. 

When a Chatbot engages visitors who want to leave, you benefit in 2 ways. First is the lead generation for marketing your services. Secondly, you’ll be able to identify the issues that make prospects leave without making a purchase. Solving these issues will raise the conversion rate of the business. 

 

2. Generating Leads through Live Chats

Messaging has become a pillar of communication in the contemporary world. Your business needs to adapt to this trend by incorporating a live chat into the website. Here are some of the ways a live chat can help the business generate leads.

• • Shortening the Sales Cycle

Asking prospects to leave their e-mails on forms is good for the lead generation process. But it lengthens the process. Why? You may be wondering. Prospects disengage from the shopping process immediately after they leave your site. The sales team is never sure of getting a response from these e-mails. And even if they do, it takes time.

A live chat enables you to engage the prospect when their mind is still focused on discovering the product. The live chat will help you guide the prospect that might lead to a demo. Live chats save time and increase the likelihood of increasing the conversion.

• • Creating Brand Ambassadors 

Not all prospects who visit the website will become your clients in the future. Some have an interest in your products, but they don’t have the means to pay for them. A live chat will help you identify this group very easily. It will enable you to alert the sales team not to put too many resources on them. But don’t dismiss them yet.

They say people never forget how you made them feel. Through a live chat, you can interact with the prospects who are unlikely to purchase and leave them with something beneficial. It can be as simple as outlining the products that they and their peers might find helpful. Some of these people will talk about your services to some of their friends who have an interest. They will inadvertently become your brand ambassadors and create more leads for you. They could have just perused through the website and left were it not for the live engagement.

• • Increasing the visitors to SQL conversion

You are never sure if prospects are looking at all the pages on your website. Those willing to buy likely go to sections like demo requests or the contact form. They aren’t that enthusiastic about doing that. That’s why you need to give them a little nudge through a live chat. Help them get to these sections to increase the chances of making a conversion.

As we said earlier, live chats help identify prospects that are unlikely to buy. The “window shoppers.” Live chats assist in isolating this group so that the sales team can focus more on prospects who are likely to buy. All these increase the visitors to SQL conversion for the website.

 

Conclusion

Chatbots and live chats are versatile that can expand your reach to potential customers. These tools help you to collect information from clients, automate the engagement process to make it faster, and offer assistance to prospects on the spot when they need it. The versatility of these tools makes them beneficial to a wide variety of business operations. The salespeople benefit from them and the customer service, lead generators, marketers, plus more. Try them out today; you won’t regret it.