Tips for Promoting Only Your Relevant, Informative Content

Earlier this month we tackled the issue of how you can prepare your .htaccess files in such a way so that your cosmetic surgery practice Web site will only serve one set of unique content to the search engines. This will minimize the duplicate filtering that will be enacted for your domain and ultimately bolster your position in the search engine results pages.

While we bit off a big chunk of technical SEO material with that entry, there’s still more that we can do behind the scenes in order to refine the visibility of our Web site.

First on our list would be the proper instatiantion of a robots.txt file. This text file is a directive for Web crawling bots (search engine spiders, for one) telling them which pages they are “allowed” to access, index and crawl through for link disovery. Pages that are not topically relevant to your domain or pages that may cannibalize a more important page of yours in the rankings should be placed on the disallow list in your robots.txt file.

While we won’t go into the technical details about setting up the actual file, we’ll continue discussing the theory of why it is good practice to control Web bots’ crawling directives (there are already plenty of resources on the Web for this - and honestly, it’s such a simple argument/value type of instantiation that we’re better off discussing it from a higher level approach).

So, for example, if you had - say - a Wordpress blog on your domain, you would immediately fall victim to tons of duplicate content due to the presence of a facsimile of every blog entry appearing across each and every tag and category page that that post is filed under, plus a copy within your archives relating to its publication date. In order to maximize our contents’ “uniqueness”, we could simply add the directories of your categories, tags, and archives pages to the robots.txt file. Simple, efficient and easy.

The robots.txt file is a great way of targeted specific crawlers as well (you can provide different directives to Google’s, Yahoo!’s and MSN’s bots). Aside from the text file, the HTML markup languge also supports the ‘robots’ attribute within the ‘meta’ element. You can provide the values of “noindex”, “nofollow”, “follow” or “index” to have them perform the aptly entitled procedures for each page where this line of code appears.

In our next discussion of on-site strategies that you can use to aid your cosmetic surgery marketing endeavors, we’ll continue taking a look at more ways of minimizing duplicate content whilst improving our internal linking structure.

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