Kaizen Internet Marketing Santa Barbara

Get more of your web pages spidered, indexed and increase your search engine positioning by doing this one simple thing.

While on the phone with Jerry West of Web Marketing Now, he told me that, “Having a robots.txt file in the root directory of your web site greatly increases a it’s spiderability.” According to his tests, “Significantly more pages get spidered, especially when the pages are two or three levels deep.” Hmmm, I wonder if search engine positioning goes up as well?

I’ve never used robots txt files on any of my sites, so I started asking around some of my SEO friends and turns out most of them use the same software to make their Robots file. The one they recommend the most is the professional version of Robot Manager.

What’s cool about this package, is that it not only generates foolproof Robots txt files, it tracks all the spidering activity that goes on at your site. You’ll know exactly which spider came, and when, and what it got. You can also use it to exclude malicious bots from your site, so it’s not busy serving some evil bot when the good Google bots are trying to get at your pages.

After some of my friends and I ran our own tests on larger sites (being a mininet fan I don’t have many large sites . I found an average of 11% more pages got indexed and on the SERPS (search engine results pages) my positioning went up an average of three places. The only change I made to the site was to add the Robots txt file to the root directory of my server (the same place the index page is stored).

According to Jerry’s private newsletter, my results are actually a little low. He’s been getting much bigger numbers. He’s been getting over 20% more pages spidered than before. But I expect that its due to his sites being quite a bit larger than mine.

So the proof is in the pudding as they say. And it’s hard to disagree with success. Point being, get a robots.txt file on your site. Either make it yourself or go buy software to do it for you. Your search engine positioning and the amount of pages you get spidered depends on it.

by Michael Campbell

Author of….

Revenge of the Mininet… Advanced search engine linking strategies and diagrams for increased revenue.

Clickin’ it Rich… The complete work from home business training system for new affiliates.

Nothing but ‘Net… Simple internet marketing strategy that made $750,000 in less than a year.

Internet Marketing Secrets Newsletter… Learn how to harness the money making power of multiple internet revenue streams like search engines, affiliate programs, paid advertising, opt-in email, newsletters, ebooks and lot more in internet marketing secrets. Subscribe now and get a free lifetime membership.

Tags: robots.txt, search engines, SEO, spiders

Since YouTube is going to recompress whatever you give it, your goal should be to get the file into the highest res format that they will accept, so that they do not compress an already overly compressed video. Youtube will now accept up to 1GB, but I would shoot for about 20MB or so per minute – 100MB for 5 minute video. Larger than this may also work fine but your upload will be longer with no noticeable difference. You can try this out yourself.

Here are some guidelines:

1. Resolution: Use 640×480 source as that gives youtube more resolution to work with when they re-encode down to 320×240. (or do the resize yourself if you think you have better software to do it, but they’ll just re-encode your 320×240 source back to 320×240 again, so why not give them more to work with?). In any case, keep an aspect ratio of 4:3, which is what Youtube uses. Also, the higher res will allow the new high res versions which Youtube will offer if your uploaded video is higher res.

2. Bit Rate: Use the HIGHEST bit rate combination for audio and video that you can and still stay under the 1GB upload per video limit. Again, this allows you to give YouTube the best possible source quality that they will accept, so when they run it through their transcoder, they’re starting with a nice clean source. Some say to aim for 1500kbps and this should be fine. Some encoders will let you set a target file size, so if yours does so, shoot for 100 MB, and you’re golden.

3. Format: MPEG4 (DivX, Xvid) is recommended. You can output from most encoders to mpeg4 and I’ve also had good results using Quicktime Pro saving to .mov format.

4. Audio: 64k Mono or 128k Stereo MP3 audio. Again, youtube will downsize your audio so start with at least this level of quality.

5. Frame rate. No matter what you upload, YouTube is going to encode it down to 15 fps, so you might be better off getting the cleanest 15 fps source you can in a good editor/encoder before uploading. On the other hand, if their encoder is good, you might want to feed it 30 fps so it can interpolate between frames itself with that higher bit rate source and 640×480 resolution. I recommend 30fps at 640 x 480 resolution at high bit rate.

Anyway, you should simply give Youtube the highest bit rate source to start with that still meets their requirements. This one thing alone will do more for end-result quality than the complicated technical tips offered on most how to optimize for Youtube video pages.

These recommended compression options are from Premier using Quicktime but are similar to other encoders as well:

1. Click on File / Export / Adobe Media Encoder. 
2. In the “Format” dropdown menu, select “QuickTime.”
3. In the “Preset” dropdown menu, select “QT 256 streaming NTSC.”
4. Click on “Video.”
5. In the “Codec” dropdown menu, select “H.264 Encoder.”
6. Set the “Pixel Aspect Ratio” to “Square Pixels (1.0).”
7. Set the resolution to 640×480.
8. Click the “Set Bitrate” option and set the bitrate to “1500″ kbps.
9. Click “OK.”
10. Click on “Audio.” 
11. In the “Codec” dropdown menu, select “32-bit integer.”
12. In the “Frequency” dropdown menu, select “44 KHz.”
13. Click “OK.”
14. Type in a file name and click “Save.”

For more details, see:
http://www.squidoo.com/youtuberight

Tags: bit rate, frame rate, optimize, upload, video, youtube