Crawlability is one of the main elements of SEO that plays a crucial role in boosting your search engine visibility. Search bots crawl websites to collect information about your website, what you do, and what products and services you offer. These bots are vital to rank your website in search engines because if they stop crawling your site, you cannot achieve a solid online presence.
You should know the technical aspects to make your website simple to navigate and easily accessible. You need to identify those elements that can ensure smooth crawling for your site.
Crawling is a part of the process known as indexing. Search engines use crawlers to determine your website’s worthiness by going through every single piece of crawlable content on it. Although, search engine crawlers cannot explore the whole domain. You have to build a good internal link structure to help them find your content efficiently.
Here is a complete guide that will help you understand how you can make your website more crawlable.
#1. Optimize your Website Architecture
The number of pages on a website depends on your products and services. It is vital to organize those pages efficiently so that search engines can easily crawl your website. In short, you need a well-designed website structure to properly organize your content.
It is essential to link relevant pages with each other to improve site architecture. For example, the homepage should link to each blog post on your website. You can link it further to the author pages as well. Building the correct structure will make it easy for bots to understand the connection between your pages and their content.
It would be wise to prioritize relevant products and services pages while creating internal links. This will help create a smoother user journey and sales funnel.
#2. Build a Sitemap
When it comes to improving the website structure and crawlability, you need to create a sitemap for your website. A sitemap is a map of your website that should be updated whenever you remove or add web pages. You can use sitemap generator tools to build a proper sitemap for your website. Once you have a complete sitemap, submit it to the Google search console to identify and fix issues in your website’s pages that may cause problems later.
#3. Increase your Crawl Budget
Your crawl budget includes the resources and pages that bots will crawl on your website. It would be best if you gave preference to the pages that you want to be crawled for increased traffic. You have to follow some steps to enhance the crawl budget.
Firstly, remove duplicate pages and fix broken link issues. After doing this, make Javascript and CSS files crawlable. It is essential to continually check the crawl status on your website for any problems.
#4. Set up a Proper URL Structure
Your URL structure is one of the vital elements of your website architecture. URLs have subdirectories and subfolders that show where the URL is leading. It is essential to keep the same URL structure for all web pages. To improve crawlability through proper URL naming, you can follow these steps:
⦁ Limit the number of characters and keep the URL short.
⦁ Avoid uppercase and unnecessary characters.
⦁ Add keywords in your URL.
Once you have a neat URL structure, you can submit the list of URLs in XML sitemap form to search engines. It provides additional context to bots so that they can easily pick URLs of your essential web pages while crawling.
#5. Use robots.txt
When a search engine bot comes to your website, it looks for robot.txt called “Robot Exclusion Protocol.” It is the protocol that prevents or allows specific bots to crawl on your website.
This protocol enables you to prevent web robots from indexing your site pages. All you need to do is use a no-index robots meta tag. It helps to keep your website safe from malicious bots. If you see any unusual activity on your website, you should immediately use robot.txt to secure it from bad bots.
#6. Assess your SEO Log Files
Log files are similar to journal entries. Web servers store a large amount of data in the log files. This data contains information on every action taken on your website. Various details exist in this data, such as IP address and content requests. It also lets you know about the user agent that you need to handle requests for a user.
You might be wondering what all this has to do with SEO. You need to know that when search bots crawl your web pages, they leave a track. You can analyze what and when something is crawled by merely going through the log files. These details are crucial as it gives you a clear idea about the usage of crawl budget and what is preventing bots from indexing your website. You can ask a web developer to check your log files or use software to analyze them yourself.
#7. Utilize Pagination
Pagination is commonly known as the division of a document into separate sections. Although, SEO has a different role to play. It utilizes the code to let search engines identify the web pages having different URLs but similar content.
For example, if you have a series of blog posts on your website and want to break them into separate sections or pages, you should use pagination. This technique will make it easy for search bots to find and crawl that series of content. It will work smoothly to make your website more crawlable by establishing a connection between all blogs of one string.
Conclusion
In the current SEO landscape, you should consider various factors to attain a robust online presence. Crawlability is one of those elements that lets Google and other search engines know about your online presence and what you do as a brand.
If your website is not crawlable, it will be next to impossible to make a mark on SERPs. To win the race for the first page on Google search, you need to utilize the right tactics that can contribute positively to improve your website’s crawlability. The key points mentioned above will surely help you in reaching your desired results.
