Directing Bots on Your Site

August 27, 2008
 

Returning last week from SES San Jose, Bruce, Susan and Virginia consider the highlights of the conference. Strong sessions, constant networking, and great opportunities for visibility were the norm. Whether listening to experienced SEOs debate tactics in the conference hall or over dinner, the Internet marketing action never slowed.

While at SES, Virginia got a chance to talk to Live Search Webmaster Center Program Manager Jeremiah Andrick. Jeremiah gave his insight into the improved functionality of the recent Webmaster Tools update and explained how by supporting the online publishing community Live Search is helping the end user gain access to the best content available.

Then Susan and Virginia give some suggestions for ways to direct search engine bots on your site. When search engine bots visit your site, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to crawl and index your pages. Effective bot herding can be achieved through a site map, robots.txt file, Meta tags and nofollow attributes.