Mark E. Buckley

Search Engine Optimization - Recommendations

Collateral Files

There are three files you might consider adding to your web site.

A robots.txt file will tell the search engine robots which directories and files they are allowed to view. Having a robots.txt file does seem to make a difference.

You may wish to include a sitemap.html file on your site. This can also be useful to your visitors if your site gets larger than a dozen or so pages.

You may wish to include a sitemap.xml file on your site. This should only be necessary if your site is over 100 pages. They are also recommended for blogs which tend to use a lot of php or asp scripting. You or your web designer will need to know XML and a server side script such as PHP.

In general I would avoid downloading another programmer's files on your web server. Variables need to be adjusted based on your server configuration. It's better to write it from scratch. It's not a difficult script to figure out.