Crawling is a vital part of SEO, but understanding exactly how it works can be confusing for some. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we’ll cover the essentials when it comes to search engine crawlers and provide you with a better understanding of how to optimize your website for crawling.
The Basics
Search engine crawlers, also referred to as bots, are automated programs that ‘crawl’ the web indexing content to help search engines deliver the most relevant results to users. The bots scan content on each webpage in order to index it and categorize it in a database.
Crawl Frequency
Search engine crawlers have a certain frequency when it comes to their crawling. Generally, they will crawl websites more frequently when the content is timely, such as news sites. On the other hand, static websites will be crawled less often.
Optimizing for Crawling
If you want to optimize your website for crawling, there are a few key things you should consider:
- Create a sitemap: Having an updated sitemap makes it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate your website and quickly discover new content.
- Clean up urls: Keep your urls neat and tidy, as this helps the crawlers understand your website more easily.
- Optimise page speed: Failing to optimise page speed can slow down the crawling process significantly, impacting your rankings.
- Identify any crawl errors: You should regularly check for any crawl errors that might be impacting your website. This can be easily done through a tools like Google Search Console.
In conclusion, managing and optimizing your website for crawling is an important part of SEO. It’s a good idea to get familiar with the fundamentals of crawling to ensure that your website is well optimised.
