Whilst all clients are unique individuals, there are several traits and behaviours that have appeared from one customer to another.

Most requests for my work is for web design by small business owners predominately outside of the UK. It would seem that these unfortunate beliefs and behaviours cross boundaries of country, race and language, and I’ve witnessed many of these traits in completely polar industries too.

With this in mind, you never know when you might come across a client that has one of these behaviours.

I hope that this article might help some aspiring freelancers out there to be more prepared for any occasion when they find themselves in situations similar to those listen below.

1. Aren’t you a mind-reader?

You’re the designer. They’re a director of a packaging company. They have no idea how they want their web layout to look, but tell you, “If you knock something up, I’ll know if I like it.”

Great. So, on the off-chance that I manage to read your mind and deliver something that meets your unpublished expectations, we will continue to work together? Plus, if I do manage to pull this off, there will be no recognition of my clairvoyant powers.

This type of design is called “concept design” and is very different to standard design; and should be handled and biled very differently too.

Design is a two-way street. As a designer, you’ll need to impress upon the client that they play an active role in the success of the project as well.

I normally ask for examples of their existing branding that they wish to retain. For example an existing logo, colour pallete or any other stationary. If this is not available (for example, if it’s a new start-up company), then questions about their target customers, demographic and any culture or message that they wish to convey to their clients often helps me to at least determine whether a comic, corporate, web 2.0 or other style is needed.

2. I don’t really have much money or I tell you that I don’t really have much money

These two are not the same.

Some clients genuinely have tiny budgets for their projects. Others have a larger availability of funds, but want to give the impression that they don’t in order to secure a bargain price.

I’ve encountered customers in the past that have claimed that the work is for a charitable organisation and, once the project was in flow, it became quite clear that the work was for a commercial company with 10 UK offices and 4 overseas branches!

As the freelancer, it’s your responsibility to identify which of these your client actually is.

Personally, I’ve found that the best way of doing this is to discuss the rough project requirements over the phone or via email before you meet with them. If your work is 100% online, ask for details of their current site or business and check it out. I wish I’d done this with my “charity” case above…

3. Free advice and wasting time is just the price of being in business

Time is free?

If you’re thinking that potential clients will come right out and tell you that they’re not going to hire you the moment the thought pops into their head, think again.

This of course might be the moral thing to do, but many clients are of the opinion, “Hey, designers are paid to provide free information and advice. Sometimes they get paid and sometimes they don’t. It’s just the cost of doing business.”

Some potential clients do this in order to fill their own knowledge gaps about the process or price, and test the water before proceeding with a project. Whilst I’m sure we can all understand and even appreciate the importance of this kind of leg work, the impact on your workload can be immense.

I offer a completely free of charge mock-up service for web design, which many would say is a potential waste of time and risk – actually inviting clients to eat into my availability.

In fact, I’ve found that many clients will want to see some form of work prior to bringing you on board, so I would probably be providing this service anyway.

By offering the service openly, I reduce the pressure for my clients and, if they decide not to proceed with the design, I provide the design as a tutorial or add to my store for other customers to benefit from.

4. I hired you 3-years ago and you’re still on retainer

Seriously?

One of the biggest peeves that I have is when clients believe that, because you have completed and delivered a project to them, you are their new “go to guy” whenever they have any technical issue – in some cases even if it’s not related to the project you completed.

I took a holiday for 10 days last year. No computer. No emails. Complete IT blackout whilst I enjoyed some well-earned time away from the monitor. When I returned, I had over 20 emails from a customer for whom I built a site in 2005 – over 4 years ago.

Apparently, they had moved server hosts and their PHP contact form now longer worked. They weren’t receiving emails and, as the site was for a holiday villa, felt that they were losing bookings and money because of this.

Although the tone of the unanswered emails progressively became more aggressive, the initial contact email wasn’t exactly overflowing with praise:

“Your programming has stopped working and you need to fix it for us ASAP”

Seriously!

After I replied, apologising that I had been on holiday, I asked if they had changed anything on the site. They replied that they had moved hosts, and I told them that their new host had caused the issue and they may not have PHP support with their new host. They upgraded their host and continued to bombard me with emails asking me to take a look at the code.

Eventually, I gave in and took a look. After about 15-minutes, I ascertained that they had also changed their email address when they changed hosts.

There was no offer of payment for the service – there wasn’t even a thank you email. In fact, I received only one more response which simply said that they would “test and get back to me with any problems”.

In hindsight, I could have avoided this if I had just explained that this was a separate project and treated it as such; provided a quote and a time that I could fit it into my work schedule. Oh well. Once bitten, twice shy.

5. I’m as smart as you

The vast majority of clients are completely clueless when it comes to designing – that’s why they’ve come to an expert. However, not all clients will admit this to themselves, let alone to you.

On the rare occasion that they do, empathise and guide. On the other occasions, it is imperative that the client understands that you are an expert. Your confidence will make the difference between being able to work efficiently or having every action questioned and guided by a novice, extending your project time exponentially.

As far as clients go: being an expert in accounting, manufacturing, or health care doesn’t mean you’re an expert in design – so let us be the designers here – we’re the experts.

6. Can you add in my content?

One more thing

This is another big issue for designers that is easily missed in your project requirements.

We bid for and plan for the creation of a web design. We slice and code a page template (or three), ready for the customer to add in their content. Then we get the files; “Here’s the content for the home page. I’ll send you over the other pages in a few minutes.”

How did this happen? You receive your files as Word documents, so you can’t copy and paste directly into the pages – plus you never signed up for this. You’re a designer and you’ve done the design.

Unfortunately, clients don’t always understand the distinction. They want a web site designing and assume that the final deliverable will be a finished, ready-to-launch site, including content. It is our responsibility to ensure that this assumption is corrected before you begin working.

If not, you’re only leaving yourself open for all the issues that come with content publishing; spelling errors, font layouts and delays in content (see #7).

7. I’ve not written the content yet. I’ll provide it as I do

I warned you!

As savvy designers and developers, we understand that content is king. It keeps your customers coming back, the search engines happy and makes your site look professional and intriguing.

Clients don’t always understand this, in which case you will receive Word documents of sub-par commentary with no direction on what to put where.

If they do understand the concept, that can be worse. Each page optimised for keywords and positioning, which takes time. They send you over one page at a time, with a day between pages – and you’ve got 50 pages to complete!

As with agreeing to upload content, you must agree this process with your writer/client at the start of your project. The client does not need the site designed and coded to write content. Ensure that they start composing content straight away or, alternatively, have them produce the content at a later date and provide all content to you in one go.

There’s nothing worse than copying and pasting a page of text and then having to wait 2-days for your next one!

8. Can you add these images?

This is another assumption that we need to correct at the start of the project: What happens with images supplied by the client?

I once agreed to upload 10 images to a customer’s site as part of their content. It’s only 10 pictures; how hard can it be? Big mistake.

The images were supplied from a digital camera at a resolution of over 2000px square. The image holders were 150x150px. Also, the images were poor quality; bad lighting and exposure meant that they also needed reworking to be used at such small resolutions.

The 10 images took me about 2-hours to rework, rescale and upload to the site. The thank you? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

And this was only a few images. Imagine if you have agreed to upload all content and there were 50. Or 100.

In summary, keep in mind that, like any other profession, you will work with some great people and some not-so-great people.

Most clients aren’t intentionally greedy or nasty, but, make no doubt, they want as much as possible for as little as possible. If you don’t nail these requirements and expectations at the start of the project, your experience will not be as pleasant as we all know freelancing can and should be.

Your goal as a designer should be to provide good service to your clients and get paid a fair rate in return. Since those goals don’t match up, it’s important to learn how to protect yourself and your rights as a designer, because your clients won’t do it for you.

Do you like to wait for pages to download? Neither do your site users. Read on and find out how to speed up that download time…

1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables

CSS downloads faster than tables because:
*  Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content
* Tables appear on the screen all in one go – no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered
* Tables encourage the use of spacer images to aid with positioning
* CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables
* All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer; table layout, stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads
* With CSS you can control the order items download on to the screen – make the content appear before slow-loading images and your site users will definitely appreciate it

To learn more about CSS and the amazing things it can do for your website, check out our CSS resources1 area.

2. Don’t use images to display text

It’s our old friend CSS to the rescue again. There’s no need to use images to display text as so much can be accomplished through CSS. Have a look at this code:

a:link
{
color: #ffffff;
background: #ff9900;
text-decoration: none;
padding: 0.2em;
border: 4px solid;
border-color: #99f #008 #008 #99f
}

a:hover
{
color: #ffffff;
background: #ffaa11;
text-decoration: none;
padding: 0.2em;
border: 4px solid;
border-color: #008 #99f #99f #008
}

This will give you a really simple button that appears to be pushed down when you mouseover it.

3. Call up decorative images through CSS

It’s possible to present images as part of the background, called up through CSS. If you’ve got an image that’s 200px by 100px you can use the following HTML code:

<div class=”pretty-image”></div>

And this CSS:

.pretty-image
{
background: url(filename.gif);
width: 200px;
height: 100px
}

This may at first seem a little pointless but this technique could really improve the download time of your pages. Browsers basically download background images after everything else. By using this technique, your text will load instantaneously and your site users can freely roam about the page while your 50kb fancy image downloads.

This technique disables the ALT attribute though so if you really want to have one then replace the above HTML code with this:

<image src=”spacer.gif” class=”pretty-image” alt=”description” />

Spacer.gif is a 1px x 1px transparent image. Now you have a 50 byte transparent image and the main content loading first, and your great big decorative image, complete with ALT text, loading second. Perfect.

Please note that this technique is only good for decorative images and not informational ones. Any user who has CSS disabled will not be able to see your CSS-embedded images (or their alternative text).

4. Use contextual selectors

This is inefficient:

<p class=”text”>This is a sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is another sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is yet another sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is one more sentence</p>

.text
{
color: #03c;
font-size: 2em
}

Instead of assigning a value to each individual paragraph, we can nest them within a <div> tag and assign a value to this tag:

<div class=”text”>
<p>This is a sentence</p>
<p>This is another sentence</p>
<p>This is yet another sentence</p>
<p>This is one more sentence</p>
</div>

.text p
{
color: #03c;
font-size:2em
}

This second CSS example basically says that every paragraph within class=”text” should be assigned a colour value of #03c and a font size of 2em.

At first glance this doesn’t look too important, but if you can apply this properly throughout your document you can easily knock off 20% of the file size.

You may have noticed the colour values are shorter than normal. #03c is a shortened version of #0033cc – you can assign this abbreviated value to any colour value like this.

5. Use shorthand CSS properties

You can use the following shorthand properties for the margin CSS command.

Use:

margin: 2px 1px 3px 4px (top, right, bottom, left)

…instead of

margin-top: 2px;
margin-right: 1px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 4px

Use:

margin: 5em 1em 3em (top, right and left, bottom)

…instead of

margin-top: 5em;
margin-right: 1em;
margin-bottom: 3em;
margin-left: 1em

Use:

margin: 5% 1% (top and bottom, right and left)

…instead of

margin-top: 5%;
margin-right: 1%;
margin-bottom: 5%;
margin-left: 1%

Use:

margin: 0 (top, bottom, right and left)

…instead of

margin-top: 0;
margin-right: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-left: 0

These rules can be applied to margin, border and padding.

6. Minimise white space, line returns and comment tags

Every single letter or space in your HTML code takes up one byte. It doesn’t sound like much but it all adds up. We’ve found that by working through your page source and eliminating unnecessary white space and comments, you can shave off up to, or even over (if your HTML is really inefficient) 10% of its file size.

7. Use relative call-ups

Try to avoid absolute call ups as they take up more space. An example of an absolute call up is: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/filename.htm”>. Much better would be <a href=”filename.htm”>. But what if some files are in different folders to other ones? Use these shorthand properties:

* <a href=”/”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com
* <a href=”/filename.html”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com/filename.html
* <a href=”/directory/filename.html”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com/directory/filename.html
* <a href=”./”> – Calls up index.html within that directory
* <a href=”../”> – Calls up index.html one directory above
* <a href=”../filename.html”> – Calls up filename.html one directory above
* <a href=”../../”> – Calls up index.html two directories above

8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content

Most META tags are pretty much unnecessary and don’t achieve very much. If you’re interested, you can see a list of META tags that are available in another article. The most important tags for search engine optimisation are the keywords and description tags, although due to mass abuse they’ve lost a lot of importance in recent times. When using these META tags try to keep the content for each under 200 characters – anything more increases the size of your pages. Lengthy META tags are not good for search engines anyway because they dilute your keywords.

9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents

To place CSS in an external document use:

<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”filename.css” />

To place JavaScript in an external document use:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”filename.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Any external file is called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer. Instead of repeating JavaScript or CSS over and over again in HTML files, just write it out once in an external document.

And don’t forget, there’s no limit to the number of these external documents that you can use! For example, instead of making one huge CSS document, have one main one and some others that are specific to certain areas of your site.

10. Use / at the end of directory links

Don’t do this: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/directoryname”>

Do this instead: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/directoryname/”>

Why? If there’s no slash at the end of the URL the server doesn’t know if the link is pointing to a file or to a directory. By including the slash the server instantly knows that the URL is pointing to a directory and doesn’t need to spend any time trying to work it out.

These are all pretty small changes, but difficult to implement after you  have deployed your site.Get it right first, and you’ll reap the benefits!

DM

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is probably one of THE most important things you can do for your website. You could have the best designed site with the absolute GREATEST content, but without being optimized it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Tip #1: Use Lowercase URLs

This is probably the easiest and quickest little boost you could give your ranking.

Depending on your server’s operating system, file names and/or directories may or may not be case sensitive. So, casing in your URLs could mean trouble.

For example, http://www.yoursite.com/portfolio.html and http://www.yoursite.com/Portfolio.html are two completely different URLs if your server is running a UNIX system. However, if your server is Windows based, then those two URLs would be one and the same.
Now just throw in the fact that www.yoursite.com and WWW.YOURSITE.COM are always going to be the same domain, and the possibility of confusion is almost inevitable.

So, the best idea is to make all file and directory names lowercase by default. This way you do not have to worry about whether or not your URLs are going to get processed correctly.

Tip #2: Dislodge Your Underscore Key

Ok, so you don’t really have to remove the underscore key from your keyboard… However, it is certainly a good idea to refrain from using the underscore and/or periods in your file names.

We’ve all seen them… The super long page name separated by underscores.

http://www.yoursite.com/my_photo_gallery_page.html

File names like this are all too common, and are detrimental to SEO.

So, why do we do it?

1. Three main reasons:We think like humans, not like computers.

We look at a line of text and read it as words, and therefor attempt to separate it accordingly. Computers on the other hand do not. A computer sees characters and couldn’t care less about it being “human readable”.
2. Underscores are promoted when picking usernames and/or email addresses

Most sites will allow the underscore to be used as a separator when choosing your username and/or email address. This makes it all that much more common for us to use the underscore key more often.
3. Underscores look more like spaces

When viewing a page and/or file name that has been separated by underscores, our brains process the gap between the words first as a regular “space”. So, it isn’t too far fetched to say that this could be a contributing factor in why people use the underscore to separate words in page/file names.

So why is it bad?

Well, the underscore is often difficult to notice and even more difficult to type. Also, using separators of any kind when naming files is usually a sign of a poorly designed site structure.
So how do we fix it?

Easy! Simply put… DON’T USE UNDERSCORES!
If you find that you just have to use some sort of separator in your file names, it is less detrimental to use the hyphen ( – ).

Tip #3: Be A Title Tell

Have you ever visited a site and noticed that in the browser’s title output area, it only reads “index.html” or “Blank”?

This is because that person did not utilize the <title> tag. The title tag (or “title element”), is used to identify the contents of a page. It is one of the most important steps to improving your optimization level, yet it’s one of the most frequently discarded.

Another thing people don’t seem to realize is that each page has to have it’s own unique title. I have personally seen countless sites that use the exact same title for each page. This gives no indication as to what kind of content is on each individual page.

It is important when picking your title, you should use keywords and/or keyword phrases that are targeted in that particular page. For example, if we had a page where we were selling Keebler Elf Memorabilia and our shop is located in Arkansas…
Ideally our title should look something like this:
<title>Keebler Elf Memorabilia | Arkansas</title>

There is no “set length” for the title tag, however you should be aware that if it is too long it can and could be truncated. I would recommend keeping your title tag text below 63 characters (including spaces).

Tip #4: HALT… In the name of SEO!

A critical, but all too often overlooked step in optimization is including the “alt” attribute to your images. This is quickly becoming more and more important to SEO, and should not be taken lightly.
Also, the alt attribute is required for valid (X)HTML.

I won’t go into a full blown explanation as that only bore you. Just know that there are a few guidelines for the alt text you add to your images.

1. Don’t try stuffing your alt attribute with keywords

This is an approach which many of the “less reputable” SEO consultants will use to attempt to get a higher keyword density. However, this approach can actually hurt your page more than help it. If your keyword density is too high, that could automatically trigger the spam filter.
2. Convey in text what the image conveys visually

This is probably the most commonly mistaken aspect of the alt attribute. The alt attribute is not necessarily supposed to be a description of the image.
* Here are a few examplesIf you have an image that’s used as a button that leads the user to the “checkout” page, the proper alt text would not be “Checkout Button”. Instead, it should be “Go to checkout” or something relatively close to that.
* Say you have an image of a magnifying glass used as your “search button”, the corresponding alt text should read “Search” or “Submit Search” or “Submit Query”
* If you are using an image which is purely for “decoration” purposes, that image should either be used as a background image in CSS or you should add the alt attribute and leave it blank.
Like so: alt=” “

That’s as deep as I’m going to get into that particular subject, as it’s nearly never ending. I will however, point you in the direction of where you can find more detailed information if needed.
Google’s FAQ is chock full information about the matter.

Tip #5: Update Update Update!

Though it may seem like a rather monotonous job to update your site with new and fresh content frequently, this can dramatically increase your rankings. A steady flow of new and RELEVANT content can help to get your site noticed by the major search engines.

This doesn’t mean that you can post 10 blog entries per day about absolutely nothing and get a better pr score, you need to post content which is relevant to the overall scope of your site and that includes targeted popular keywords and phrases.

Keep in mind that this is only the “tip of the iceberg” so to speak. These are just simple, quick ways that you can help to improve your relevancy to the net. If you put into practice each of the tips mentioned above, you can expect to notice a difference in your ranking.

I’m not guaranteeing that you will be bumped to the top, but you should notice a difference no matter how small. Every little bit counts, right?

DM

User-agent: *

Disallow:

The User-agent field is for specifying robot name for which the access policy follows in the Disallow field. Disallow field specifies URLs which the specified robots have no access to. An example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Here “*” means all robots and “/ ” means all URLs. This is read as, “No access for any search engine to any URL” Since all URLs are preceded by “/ ” so it bans access to all URLs when nothing follows after “/ “. If partial access has to be given, only the banned URL is specified in the Disallow field. Lets consider this example:

# Research access for Googlebot.

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /concepts/new/

Here we see that both the fields have been repeated. Multiple commands can be given for different user agents in different lines. The above commands mean that all user agents are banned access to /concepts/new/ except Googlebot which has full access. Characters following # are ignored up to the line termination as they are considered to be comments.

Working with the robots.txt file

1. The robots.txt file is always named in all lowercase (e.g. Robots.txt or robots.Txt is incorrect)

2. Wildcards are not supported in both the fields. Only * can be used in the User-agent field’s command syntax because it is a special character denoting “all”. Googlebot is the only robot that now supports some wildcard file extensions.
Ref: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8475

3. The robots.txt file is an exclusion file meant for search engine robot reference and not obligatory for a website to function. An empty or absent file simply means that all robots are welcome to index any part of the website.

4. Only one robots.txt file can be maintained per domain.

5. Website owners who do not have administrative rights cannot sometimes make a robots.txt file. In such situations, the Robots Meta Tag can be configured which will solve the same purpose. Here we must keep in mind that lately, questions have been raised about robot behavior regarding the Robots Meta Tag. Some robots might skip it altogether. Protocol makes it obligatory for all robots to start with the robots.txt thereby making it the default starting point for all robots.

6. Separate lines are required for specifying access to different user agents and Disallow field should not carry more than one command in a line in the robots.txt file. There is no limit to the number of lines though i.e. both the User-agent and Disallow fields can be repeated with different commands any number of times. Blank lines will also not work within a single record set of both the commands.

7. Use lower-case for all robots.txt file content. Please also note that filenames on Unix systems are case sensitive. Be careful about case sensitivity when defining directory or files for Unix hosted domains.

You can use the robots.txt Validator to check your robots.txt from www.searchengineworld.com.

Advantages of the robots.txt file
Protocol demands that all search engine robots start with the robots.txt file. This is the default entry point for robots if the file is present. Specific instructions can be placed on this file to help index your site on the web. Major search engines will never violate the Standard for Robots Exclusion.

1. The robots.txt file can be used to keep out unwanted robots like emailing retrievers, imaging strippers etc.

2. The robots.txt file can be used to specify the directories on your server that you don’t want robots to access and/or index e.g. temporary, cgi, and private/back-end directories.

3. An absent robots.txt file could generate a 404 error and redirect the robot to your default 404 error page. Here it was noticed after careful research that sites that do not have a robots.txt file present and had a customized 404-error page, would serve the same to the robots. The robot is bound to treat it as the robots.txt file, which can confuse it’s indexing.

4. The robots.txt file is used to direct select robots to relevant pages to be indexed. This specially comes in handy where the site has multilingual content or where the robot is searching for only specific content.

5. The need for the robots.txt file was also felt to stop robots from deluging servers with rapid-fire requests or re-indexing the same files repeatedly. If you have duplicate content on your site for any reason, the same can be controlled from getting indexed. This will help you avoid any duplicate content penalties.

Disadvantages of the robots.txt file
Careless handling of directory and filenames can lead hackers to snoop around your site by studying the robots.txt file, as you sometimes may also list filenames and directories that have classified content. This is not a serious issue as deploying some effective security checks to the content in question can take care of it. For example if you have your traffic log on your site on a URL such as www.domain.com/stats which you do not want robots to index, then you would have to add a command to your robots.txt file. As an example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /stats/

However, it is easy for a snooper to guess what you are trying to hide and simply typing the URL www.domain.com/stats in his browser would enable access to the same. This calls for one of the following remedies -

1. Change file names:
Change the stats filename from index.php to something different, such as stats- new.php so that your stats URL now becomes www.domain.com/stats/stats-new.php

Place a simple text file containing the text, “Sorry you are not authorized to view this page”, and save it as index.php in your /stats/directory.

This way the snooper cannot guess your actual filename and get to your banned content.

2. Use login passwords:
Password-protect the sensitive content listed in your robots.txt file.

Optimization of the robots.txt file
The Right Commands in robots.txt :
Use correct commands. Most common errors include – putting the command meant for “User-agent” field in the “Disallow field” and vice-versa.

Please also note that there is no “Allow” command in the standard robots.txt protocol. Content not blocked in the “Disallow” field is considered allowed. Currently, only two fields are recognized: “The User-agent field” and the “Disallow field”. Experts are considering the addition of more robot recognizable commands to make the robots.txt file more Webmaster and robot friendly.

Note     Note: Google is the only search engine, which is experimenting with certain new robots.txt commands.
It recognizes the “allow” command. Please read more details on the google site for robots.txt usage.

Bad Syntax:
Do not put multiple file URLs in one Disallow line in the robots.txt file. Use a new Disallow line for every directory that you want to block access to. Incorrect Robots.txt

Example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /concepts/ /links/ /images/

Correct robots.txt example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /concepts/

Disallow: /links/

Disallow: /images/

Files and Directories:
If a specific file has to be disallowed, end it with the file extension and without a forward slash in the end. Study the following robots.txt example:

For file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /hilltop.phpl

For Directory:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /concepts/

Remember if you have to block access to all files in the directory, you don’t have to specify each and every file in robots.txt. You can simply block the directory as shown above. Another common error is leaving out the slashes altogether. This would leave a very different message than intended.

The Right Location for the robots.txt file:
No robot will access a badly placed robots.txt file. Make sure that the location is www.domain.com/robots.txt.

Capitalization in robots.txt
Never capitalize your syntax commands. Directory and filenames are case sensitive in Unix platforms. The only capitals used per standard are: “User-agent ” and “Disallow”

Correct Order for robots.txt :
If you want to block access to all but one or more than one robot, then the specific ones should be mentioned first. Lets study this robots.txt example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

User-agent: MSNbot

Disallow:

In the above case, MSNbot would simply leave the site without indexing after reading the first command. Correct syntax is:

User-agent: MSNbot

Disallow:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The robots.txt file :
Not having a robots.txt file at all could generate a 404 error for search engine robots, which could redirect the robot to the default 404-error page or your customized 404-error page. If this happens seamlessly, it is up to the robot to decide if the target file is a robots.txt file or an html file. Typically it would not cause many problems but you may not want to risk it. It’s always a better idea to put the standard robots.txt file in the root directory, than not having it at all.

The standard robots.txt file for allowing all robots to index all pages is:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Using # Carefully in the robots.txt file:
Adding comments after the syntax commands is not a good idea using “#”. Some robots might misinterpret the line although it is acceptable as per the robots exclusion standard. New lines are always preferred for comments.

Using the robots.txt file

* Robots are configured to read text. Too much graphic content could render your pages invisible to the search engine. Use the robots.txt file to block irrelevant and graphic-only content.

* Indiscriminate access to all files, it is believed, can dilute relevance to your site content after being indexed by robots. This could seriously affect your site’s ranking with search engines. Use the robots.txt file to direct robots to content relevant to your site’s theme by blocking the irrelevant files or directories.

* The robots.txt file can be used for multilingual websites to direct robots to relevant content for relevant topics for different languages. It ultimately helps the search engines to present relevant results for specific languages. It also helps the search engine in its advanced search options where language is a variable.

* Some robots could cause severe server loading problems by rapid firing too many requests at peak hours. This could affect your business. By excluding some robots that might be irrelevant to your site, in the robots.txt file, this problem can be taken care of. It is really not a good idea to let malevolent robots use up precious bandwidth to harvest your emails, images etc.

* Use the robots.txt file to block out folders with sensitive information, text content, demo areas or content yet to be approved by your editors before it goes live.

The robots.txt file is an effective tool to address certain issues regarding website ranking. Used in conjunction with other SEO strategies, it can significantly enhance a website’s presence on the net.

DM

Title Tags:
The title tag is a great place to add your targeted keywords. The text inside the title tag displays as your page’s title in the search engines’ results. The title tag should be no more than 6 or 7 words, with the keywords appearing at the beginning of the tag. If your title is any longer, the level of Keyword Density drops (so the words become less important to the SERPS).

Anchor Text:
Anchor text links are ranked as very valuable to search engines, so plenty of them should be in your web pages. The most powerful anchor texts of all are those whose text contains targeted keywords.  Each click on an inbound keyword anchor link will count as a vote of that keyword to a search engine’s rankings. There’s a whole article on Anchor Text Optimisation available in the archives.

Heading Tags:
Adding keywords in heading tags (H1, H2 and H3) is as beneficial as putting them in the page title. Do not use words like “and”, “for”, “the”, etc. as they are ignored by search engine spiders. Try to make best possible use of this place in your website.

URL:
Including targeted keywords in your website’s URL is helpful from an SEO perspective. Also be sure to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URL to separate text. As with title tags, the more words you have, the less “strength” or weight they will have with the search engines.

Meta Tags:
Although Meta tags are no longer recognized by Google, they are still helpful for other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are optimizing for other search engines, it’s a good idea to place some keywords in Meta tags. If you would like to read more on meta tags, there’s a list of meta tags and also an article on the myths of SEO and meta tags.

Alt Tags:
Search engine spiders are unable to read images or graphics. If you have images in your web pages, then make sure to include several top targeted keywords in the ALT tags. Be careful not to “stuff” the alt tags with too many keywords, however, or your rankings could be dropped.

Website Body:
Strategically “sprinkling” keywords throughout the body of your website is ideal. All pages should contain at least the top 2 keywords that you are targeting, and all articles and other content should be peppered with various targeted keywords as much as possible. Also note that the closer to the top of your page, the moreweight the search engines will add to them.

Using this short list to help you with your keyword placements will surely benefit your search engine rankings.

DM

2. To appear higher in Google’s organic search results, the foremost thing you should do is to remove spider traps, like long URL’s, too much JavaScript, Flash or other rich media on your pages and improper URL redirects. Check your site if it is clearly mapped out for Google (Yahoo!, MSN etc) to get your site indexed easily. You may want to use content lists, like categories or a sitemap too.

3. The file name of the webpage plays a small role in improving the search engine relevance. Using short keywords in the file name not only helps identifying the page content but also improves page relevance for the term. Therefore, it is better to name a page like – http://www.datamouse.biz/blog/wordpress/is-your-site-chrome-compatible/62/ rather than http://www.datamouse.biz/blog/wordpress/Page?page=62. Also, make sure you use hyphens ‘-’ between keywords instead of underscores ‘_’. Google considers hyphen as a space and underscores as a merged single word.

4. Avoid using subdomains unless absolutely necessary as search engines often treat them as a separate domain and limit the pass-through of the trust value of your main site to it.

5. Make sure to mention your geographical information like your real world address on your pages. This information should be included in HTML so that the spiders can read and distinguish it. Modern bots are looking for area codes, zip codes and city names to assist their Search Engine users in locating stores and services near their location. This will provide you a competitive advantage when someone searches for your business.

6. If for some reason, you have no option other than using flash, there is something called Macromedia SDK that helps search engines to understand what the page (or website) is about as it helps the bots to crawl through the flash page. You may also want to add more keyword rich content in ‹NOEMBED› tags.

7. Don’t just rely on a single way, for Search Engines to index your website. Most importantly, you must put link to new pages on your site map. Update your Google site map every time you add a new page. If there’s a corresponding page on your site that you can use to link to the new page, do so. Don’t forget to mention your new page on your blog. In case of blogs, ping Google, Yahoo, technorati, etc every time you post a blog.

8. It always helps your ranking to have a keyword in your domain name, given that you have strong internal and external linking for the same keyword. If you have useful content on your website, people will link to your website using your domain name as anchor text (which carries your keyword), so your ranking for that keyword will improve. But even if you don’t have a keyword in your domain name, there’s no need to worry as the off page factors contribute to rankings. For e.g. consider Adobe, it is the top result out of 3 billion results for the keyword phrase “click here”. This is because of the off-page factors, and not owing to presence (or absence) of “click here” in Adobe’s domain name.

9. You must pay attention while writing the title and description for your website. Your page may only be ranking number 5 or 6 on Search Engines, but if you’ve taken enough time to create an enticing title and description for all your pages, you may still manage to earn the same CTR as the one sitting on the number one spot. Similarly, a website ranking number one for a keyword might have a poor CTR if the webmaster hasn’t put in enough thought while writing the website’s title and description.

10. Anchor text is one of the best places to insert your keyword phrases. Go through your website and look for phrases like ‘Click here for a quote’, ‘Click here for more information’ etc. Suppose ‘Click here for a mortgage loan quote’ or ‘Click here for more Denver coffee shop information’. But make sure the entire sentence is a link or if not, at least make the keyword phrase a link.

11. If you are serious about doing a long term online business, don’t engage yourself in black hat SEO practices. Even though they can give you short term Search Engine advantage but will hurt you badly in long term:

• Don’t use hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or lightning fast java redirects.
• Don’t load up your pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

12. At SMX, all of the engineers from all the search engines made a statement that 301 redirect will not carry the full effect if the content of the redirecting website is topically not the same. We should avoid redirecting our website to a site which is topically irrelevant to our website. For e.g. if you are planning to redirect (301) your website about cars, then you should not redirect it to a website selling watches. An inappropriate redirect will not lead to any benefit to your website.

13. Dumping new content on your website in one go is not such a good idea from the search engine’s point of view. Make sure that you consistently add new posts and articles on a regular basis. This will not only increase the bot crawl frequency of your website, but will also result in frequent repeated traffic.

14. For an optimized body copy, it is extremely important for a website to not only have the most important keywords, but it must also read well naturally. Modern search engines use artificial intelligence (called Latent Symentic Indexing), that is a measure of how well the supporting content and text match to the theme of the website. So there is no point of wasting your time on keyword stuffing anymore; instead you must look to refine the content as much as possible.

15. Did you know that on May 12, Google announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners to grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. It helps you to attract more visitors, enrich your site with social features and the best part is that you need no programming skills whatsoever to use Friend Connect on your site.

16. If you want to make sure that Search Engines index each and every link on your website, you may want to add a link to your sitemap on every important new page that you create on your website. This not only improves the Search Engine Indexing but also also consolidates the internal linking of your website.

17. Followed by the red carpet seomoz Web 2.0 awards 2008 was the ‘.0′ update from Google when Google decided to deindex the seomoz web 2.0 award page just because the URL of the page ended up with a ‘.0′. The page earlier used to rank number one for semoz web 2.0 awards but as the back link weightage shifted from ‘web2.0/’ to ‘web 2.0′, Google picked up the latter and decided to unindex it as Google internally uses ‘.0′ extensions to recognize the files they don’t want to follow. So here is a new way how you can hide your pages from Google – simply end up the URL with ‘.0′. It works.

18. When your search engine rankings fluctuate, or even if your site drops from the rankings, don’t panic. Understand that these things happen in this industry, and they WILL happen to you. What you DON’T want to do is make any changes to your web pages because of fluctuations in the rankings or because your site drops out of the rankings. Step back and wait to see what happens- monitor your rankings, watch the industry and read the news. In all likelihood, your pages will reappear right back where they should be (or close to those rankings), if you haven’t done anything wrong (such as using spam). Fluctuations in rankings are normal. Far too many people panic in the short term, when they would be wiser to just take it easy and not start making changes so quickly.

19. While you are optimizing a page for a specific phrase, think about why a searcher used that specific phrase. If you are optimizing a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page, are you delivering your most frequently asked questions? Think of the circumstances that might lead an individual to search for certain specific phrases like:
“infant pillow support” (Would this attract parents of newborn babies?)
“Meaning of babies names” (Would this attract “soon to be” parents?)

20. Discover Your Competitors: It’s a fact that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

DM

Google has jumped in the browser battle going on between MS Internet Explorer & Mozilla Firefox with the launch of Google Chrome. Google Chrome is indeed a wonderful and highly secured browser and gives some advanced functionality to users. I have tried Chrome and I think it’s ideal for people who are basic surfers. It’s free and you can also download it from here -

http://www.google.com/chrome

Checkout this cool article on Search Engine Land that compares Google Chrome with IE & Firefox: http://searchengineland.com/080903-130137.php

Some of the features that i find intriguing are that the browser gives each page its own “memory” through multi-threading technology and you can use itsbuiltin task manager much like the Windows version – identiying and killing resource-hogging plugins. Also, “Sandboxing” each page as its loaded is a really secure way to browse the web.

No doubt, Chrome is hot and comes with some really cool new features but sadly it doesn’t yet support my favorite plugins. So guess I’ll wait till Chrome grows up and until then I’ll continue firefoxing!

DM

One might think SEO is an arcane science that only a few experts have mastered. There is quite a bit to it, and there are times you might want to employ an SEO firm or expert to help you optimize your site. Often this is a costly solution that’s not feasible for individuals or small businesses.

The good news is Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are quite a few things you can do on your own. I’ve got a few proven, and easy to do tips and techniques that will help people find your content and make it easy for Google (and other engines) to crawl and index your site.

Lead with good content.

My number one tip for SEO? Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.
Research your keywords.

You can use a Keyword Suggestion Tool or simply put yourself in the mindset of your target audience. Learn which terms people will search with and get those into your content and meta information.

Provide a good, clear title.

If SEO is important to you make sure you don’t get cute with the titles for your pages. Write titles that are clear and contain your keywords. Once you’ve got that title written, make sure it appears in your title tag as well as in your top level heading tags (h1) on your pages.

Don’t use splash pages or Flash.

Search engines like text. A Flash or image intro can block an engine’s crawler right at your homepage. If you do use images, be sure to add keyword laden descriptions to your alt attributes. There are discussions about Google now being capable of “reading” Flash content. This is not entirely true.

Google can apparently read text from Flash files, but cannot yet put that text into context with the rest of your site. You may have Flash text elements that say “click here” or similar,with the bulk of your other “text” actually being images. These are still invisible to google and I would still advise against using for the time being.

Use Robots.txt

Make sure you provide a robots.txt file that will help tell crawlers what to index on your site. There are quite a few neat things you can do with your robots.txt file, so you might want to read up on them.

Code your pages with standard, clean and semantic markup.

The cleaner your code the easier it is to crawl. Use markup as it is intended with the proper tags tied to the proper information. For example, place your headings with in heading tags, paragraphs within paragraph tags, etc. Another good idea is to move all your presentation into a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file. This makes your code lighter, faster and easier to index.

Don’t get tricky!

Whatever you do, don’t try to “trick” your way into more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalized and ruin any positive work you’ve done.

Be patient and don’t forget the people!

Search engines are constantly updating and re-indexing. It may take awhile after you’ve made some changes to see the results. Hang in there, keep working on your content and keep providing something that people find useful.

It’s easy to forget that the reason you want to optimize for search in the first place is that you want to bring people to your site and your content!

DM

What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is defined as any action or adjustment, also known as Optimization that you perform on your site for the purpose of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your site from search engines by utilizing search results for targeted keywords. From implementing Human Readable URLs and Keyword targeting, to Marketing, to adding a no-index page or directory to your robots.txt file,Optimizing of title tags and Meta tags makes a huge difference to make your site visible on search engines. Anchor texts on the pages are optimized with important keywords and target pages. The content on the page is adequately marked up using HTML tags or through CSS. Search engines reward pages with more text content, these optimization steps are done to make the site SE friendly.All of this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor.  If your URL shows up far down the results, the chances of the costumer never finding you increase incrementally.

Why it is wise to outsource SEO to experts?
Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this by creating carefully chosen keywords. Setting up a SEO friendly website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals.

If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Whether you are a sole trader or a big business, SEO can boost targeted traffic on your website but cannot guarantee conversion if the website is not positioned well. With SEO you can get free clicks to your site from customers who are looking for your product or service.

Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign.

Where you rank defines your company. Out of sight out of mind has never been more accurate as it pertains to search engine positioning. To the victor go the spoils; in this case, those who rank at the helm of a popular keyword or key phrase have a higher potential of attracting a higher click through rate from search engine queries.

To conclude, ensuring you get the best ROI for your marketing program means taking advantage of all the different flavors of SEO. Having an aesthetically beautiful site is not that vital than to have an SEO friendly website.

DM

1. Optimizing for the wrong keywords:
The biggest sin anyone can make in a SEO campaign is to choose the wrong keywords to optimize your site with. If your Site is ranking high for a keyword that is not being searched for then even a very high ranking cannot bring you any traffic. On the other hand, if you are ranking high with wrong keywords then you would get you traffic but will not convert into transactions.

2. Spamming:
Search Engines are getting smarter by the day. Over a period of time Search Engines have evolved from “Ignoring” spam to a point where they now ‘penalize’ websites for using spam techniques. Following are the prominent Search engine spam techniques you should avoid.

Hidden text:
Hidden text is using the same color text on your page as the background color. In order to get a higher keyword density, webmasters sometimes add a lot of keywords as hidden text because they are not visible to the human viewer but can be read by the search engine crawlers in the source code of the page. Most search engines can now detect which pages use such techniques and ignore or ban such sites.

Doorway pages:
A doorway page is a web page designed for search engines so as to rank well for specific keyword phrases and redirect a user to a different page on visit. This is called “bait & switch” technique. These pages usually rely on frequent repetition of the keyword phrase, and try to “trick” search engines into ranking them well. Most search engines can now detect techniques such as “Meta Refresh” and penalize such sites. If you’ve used doorway pages on your website and it is still not penalized, you stand a good chance to come out clean by deleting these pages immediately.

Doorway domains / multiple domains with same content:
This technique uses URL-redirection meant to display another web address for the same web page or several domains show same content. In a typical example, the user types in a web address such as www.new-blue-widget.com but the URL is redirected to www.widget.com. Alternately, both these websites show identical content in the hope that one or the other may rank high in the search engine result pages (SERP). Most of the time these domains are registered by the same party. Many people also use ‘disposable’ domain names in sending out email spam so as to protect their main domains. Search engines can easily detect these techniques.

Duplicate content:
Many site owners try to increase their content base by creating multiple pages of the same content either on the same site or copying the same site over several domains they may own. Search engines avoid cluttering their index with duplicate content and penalize sites which do excessive content duplication in order to ‘trick’ their algorithms.

Cloaking:
Cloaking is a technique of serving keyword-stuffed spam pages to search engine spiders by detecting their IP address, while serving totally different pages to human visitors. This is different than geo-targeting where you may show different content to different visitors based on their region or language. The search engines can differentiate between the two and might penalize your site if you are attempting to ‘trick’ them. If you want to avoid any penalties, the thumb rule is to show the same content to search engines that you show to the visitors.

Keyword spam:
Keyword spam is a technique to stuff lots of keywords all over the page – in the Title tag, Meta tags, Anchor texts, Alt Attributes etc., in an attempt to increase keyword density or accommodate large number of keywords on the same page. This not only results in the page text to sound stupid to your readers, but you also lose the ‘theme’ of the page. Search engines rate pages as per ‘themes’ and credit pages which have content classified in nicely laid out ‘themes’. For best results, one should always focus on optimizing a page with 2-3 themed keywords rather than trying to optimize with lots of keywords. Over-optimized pages with keyword spam may invite search engine penalties.

Excessive HTML markup:
It is common knowledge that search engines give more credit to text marked as Headline <H1> / <H2> or other attributes like making the text bold, underlined, colored, italicized etc. In an attempt to improve importance of the text, many webmasters do an excessive HTML markup of their page content and hide the ugly display behind a craftily made CSS. Search engines have a fair idea of a balanced markup and penalize sites which do excessive HTML markup in an attempt to ‘trick’ their algorithms.

3. Creating search engine roadblocks:
If you are developing a website, it helps to know of ways you can prevent creating search engine roadblocks. Your SEO efforts may not get results if your site structure is such that search engines find it difficult to index your site easily. Following are some of the problem areas which create a hurdle in your site indexing -

Having Flash-based site:
Sites built in Flash may have a greater aesthetic impact but perform poorly in search engines. Most search engines cannot read text or links embedded in Flash. It is best to limit the use of flash for content which absolutely requires flash or make a text-based alternate for your website so that search engine crawlers can index your site content easily.

Having text in images:
Search engines cannot read text embedded in images. If you have too much content and navigation using graphic, image maps or image buttons, it would be good to either convert them to simple text or have an alternate navigation bar at the bottom of your website. It would also help to have appropriate text in the Alt-Text tag for each image. Similarly

Having frame-based sites:
If you have built your website using frames, you might have a major problem indexing content sitting inside frames. The way frames and the content page URLs are structured, most search engines find it difficult to reach the inner page content of your website. It is best to restructure your website and remove frames so that you can get your site in the search engine index.

Having free content behind login:
Some sites & forums prefer the visitors to login before they can reach the real content of the website. Due to lack of awareness or inadvertently, if you have placed all your content behind a login, then the search engines cannot index your site as their crawlers cannot fill in a login-password or ‘register’ on your website. You might want to restructure your website such that you can show the publicly-available content without the need to login to your website.

Poor site inter-linking:
Poor site interlinking not only poses hurdles to search engines for indexing your site but also makes your site navigation difficult for your site visitors. It is advisable to have a good navigation bar and a site map on your site so that each page is not more than two clicks away.

Deep directory structure:
A deep directory structure is generally difficult for search engines to crawl. While it is not a rule, it would be good if you can keep your directories not more than one or two levels down, neatly classified into ‘themes’. Deep directory structure also makes your inner pages URLs look too long which discourages other sites to link to your inner pages.

4. Having less content / Non-original content:
Search engines thrive on text content. They are mainly looking for text content on your website and reward sites which have lots of easily accessible, non-duplicate original text content. If your sites has less or non-original content picked up from other sites or your affiliate sites, it is unlikely that you would be rewarded, no matter how many efforts you put in optimizing your website. A good way to generate original content is to write nice, keyword rich, descriptive articles classified in themes, about your product or service, its usage, benefits and tips etc.

5. Using session IDs:
Session ID is a long string of jumbled characters appearing in the URL of your website which changes on each visit. They are usually used to track a visitor ’s online shopping cart contents. When a search engine crawler visits your website, your server assigns it a session ID and the crawler indexes your content and associates it with that session ID. Most search engines have hundreds of bots crawling and re-crawling the web. On each repeat visit of the crawler to your website, they index a fresh copy of your content and associates it with different URLs (session IDs) resulting in cluttering the search engine database with lots of duplicate content. Since search engines are not very good at tackling this problem, they often drop the site from future indexing. If you wish to track as user’s session, a better solution is to use cookies instead of session IDs. Cookies are information files stored on user’s computers and perform the same task as a session ID.

6. No efforts in getting incoming links:
Incoming links to your website are very important and are responsible for high rankings on search engines to a large extent. Link popularity determines how important your site is. Link building is an important part of your SEO campaign. No extent of site optimization can get you high rankings if you do not carry out a supporting link building campaign.

7. Relying on one-time SEO:
Search engine optimization is a constant process. You need to update your website SEO when you add new content, update old content or change the theme of your web pages. Addition of new content often requires you to update site interlinking, improve navigation and add links in your site map. Search patterns and keyword phrases also change over time as the search community matures or industry trends change. This requires a fresh keyword research and SEO perspective on your site. Changes may also become necessary if your current SEO strategy is not paying off. In any case, optimizing your site once and expecting it to give you sustained results without further efforts is a mistake.

8. Showing impatience:
SEO of a website rarely show instant results. If your site is already indexed in search engines, it may take about 4-8 weeks to index your new content. New sites may take 4-6 months to get indexed for the first time. It takes time for SEO results to show up. It is easy to think the past efforts were not good enough and get tempted to change the optimization techniques. It is not advisable to change the optimization of your site pages before you are able to see the results of your previous SEO efforts.

If you keep the above points in mind while carrying out SEO for your site, you would be safe from any penalties. If you are outsourcing your site SEO to a professional company, make sure they adhere to the above guidelines and do not risk your site into a search engine penalty. Remember, just a few precautions can go a long way in having your site rank high and stay away from undesirable search engine penalties.

DM