So you have asked the all-important question, ‘how to boost my SEO ranking fast?’ Most people do not realise that they are able to increase their SEO by taking advantage of a single file that is a natural part of every website. It is so simple and effective, yet I never seem to hear any discussion around it. This file is the robot.txt file. Requiring no technical knowledge or coding experience, this file has the potential to increase your rankings with very little time and effort. I have seen just a few lines of text added to a robot.txt file take websites from position 20 to top 3 in SERP’s.
The majority of the time when I mention the use of robot.txt files as an effective method of increasing SEO to other digital marketing experts I am met with the common phrase ‘that’s too easy, if it was that easy everyone would be doing it’. But the truth is not many SEO experts seem to take the time to understand what I am talking about. So what has this got to do with discovering how to boost my SEO ranking? How exactly can the robot.txt file increase SEO?
How this File can impact your seo
It all comes down to the allocated crawl budget. The crawl budget is defined as ‘the number of URL’s Googlebot is able to crawl on any given day’, and with search engines crawling every single file and page under your domain, this can quickly eat up the allocated crawl budget. Before a crawl bot begins crawling your site it will check the robot.txt file for instructions as to what should or should not be crawled. By instructing crawler bots to avoid unimportant or duplicate content on your website you are able to index only the most important content on your website. Examples of pages that you should instruct crawl bots to avoid are admin log in pages, thank you pages, 404 pages, policy pages etc. This can also prevent server overload, which is a common error I see in newly developed websites e.g. 5xx error.
Ultimately, by having control over what pages are crawled on your website greatly minimises the possibility of error, thus dramatically increasing rankings. Not only that, by optimising how crawl bots spend their budget you are ensuring that your content is displayed in the most optimal way across SERP’s, thus increasing visibility.
Honestly, I am quite shocked that this is not a regular topic that is in discussion when it comes to SEO as I have seen the benefits it can provide and witnessed the effort and skill required to implement. For 5 minutes of work you can replicate the results of other SEO strategies that take hours of work to implement.
Personally, I would highly recommend having a go at editing your robot.txt file to get an idea of the benefits it can provide. It requires no serious time commitments and if it doesn’t work you are able to delete the file and start again so there is no reason not to delve deeper into this and see for yourself.