Search engine crawlers require specific instructions from your website and the robots.txt file will help you do it. Don’t worry if you are listening to this filename for the first time. Because here we will let you know what is a robots file and how you can optimize your WordPress robots.txt for SEO.
Higher rankings are always the priority for any website. And without an optimized robots.txt file you cannot achieve it. So let’s start with our step by step guide on how to optimize your WordPress robots.txt for SEO services.
What Is A Robots.txt File?
This file is an instructional file on your website. This file is containing all the instructions that you want to give to search engine crawlers. Search engine crawlers require specific instructions to crawl all the important pages on your site.
Why Is It So Important?
Robots file is important because it tells search engine crawlers what to crawl and what to not. It helps clear the clutter from the list and make sharply pointed crawling. So it is directly impacting your search engine rankings. If you want to communicate properly with search engines and their crawlers, then this is the best way to do it.
What If You Don’t Have Robots.txt File?
Don’t worry, it never means that search engine crawlers will not visit your website if you don’t have a robots.txt file. By default, most of the websites don’t have such files. But you can create a robot file to guide search engine crawlers. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do it. Because the following are step by step instructions to create and optimize robots.txt files on your WordPress site.
Steps To Optimize Robots.txt File
Follow this step by step guide if you want to optimize robots.txt files on your website. So let’s start with step one.
Create A Robots.txt File
The first step is to create a robot.txt file. Sometimes if your website is new, you don’t have a robot.txt file by default. That is why it is really important to check whether you have one or you need to create one for your site.
Use A Plugin
Safari Digital Jacksonville SEO suggest that the easiest method to check whether your website has a robot.txt file or not is to use a plugin. There are many plugins available on WordPress sites to check it. Some plugins will be used to create or edit the robot.txt file to make it an optimized file for SEO. Following are the two major plugins used by 80% of the webmasters.
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Yoast Plugin
Yoast SEO plugin is used by many WordPress webmasters. It makes it easy for newbies to optimize their site. From technical to on-page SEO, it helps you. The best thing about the Yoast plugin is that it tells you whether you have a robots.txt file or not. With a few clicks, you can create a robots.txt file.
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AIO SEO
AIO SEO or All in One SEO is another SEO plugin used by most SEO reseller or WordPress webmasters. This tool is really helpful when you are creating a robots file for your WordPress website.
Edit Robots.txt File
Now the next step is to edit the robots.txt file on your WordPress website. Again you can use the same plugin as you have used to create a robots.txt file. There are many other ways to do it manually. But for more convenience, doing it with the help of a plugin is the best way to follow.
- Use Yoast To Edit
- Use AISEO To Edit
Add Rules To Robots.txt File
Now the question is what to add while editing the robots.txt file on your WordPress website. You need to add rules to your file. These rules will be working as the instructions for search engine crawlers or bots.
Some Rules That Can Help
Most commonly there are five types of rules that you can add to your robots.txt file to make it an optimized file for you. But there can be some other rules too, depending upon your requirement — following are some of these rules.
- Allow
- Disallow
- User-agent
- Crawl-delay
- Sitemap
Test Your Robots.txt File
Now the next and almost last step of this guide is to test your robots.txt file. There are several online tools and freeware tools available to do this. However, we recommend using the Google search console to test your robots.txt file. If you find anything missing or any bug, then fix it to make it optimized properly.
Summary
Optimizing the robots file on any website is crucial to SEO. It helps search engine crawlers to find more useful content and pages. If they find every piece of content in the right way, they will rank it in the right place. So better robots.txt file instructions mean better website indexing. And indexing matters a lot when you are doing SEO for your website.