Site Crawlers, what are those? You will understand the concept once you go through this post. We will try to help you understand Search Engine Optimization
Site Crawlers
What is Search Engine Optimization?
what is search engine optimization and why is it important
SEO is the process of optimizing any given search word or term for a search engine on your site
- Increases organic Traffic
- ROI
- Brand Awareness
- Build Trust
The competition is doing it
If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist, Wikipedia Jimmy Wales
Google share on desktop is 87% and on mobile, it’s 95.67%
- Page speed
- Keywords research
- Backlinking and authority
It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.
If knowing your audience’s intent is one side of the SEO coin, delivering it in a way search engine crawlers can find and understand is the other.
How do search engines work?
Search engines work through three primary functions:
- Crawling: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.
- Indexing: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
- Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher’s query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.
Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of pages using their own web crawlers. These web crawlers are commonly referred to as search engine bots or spiders. A search engine navigates the web by downloading web pages and following links on these pages to discover new pages that have been made available.
As you’ve just learned, making sure your site gets crawled and indexed is a prerequisite to showing up in the SERPs. If you already have a website, it might be a good idea to start off by seeing how many of your pages are in the index.
If you’re not showing up anywhere in the search results, there are a few possible reasons why:
- Your site is brand new and hasn’t been crawled yet.
- Your site isn’t linked to any external websites.
- Your site’s navigation makes it hard for a robot to crawl it effectively.
- Your site contains some basic code called crawler directives that is blocking search engines.
- Your site has been penalized by Google for spammy tactics.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt files are located in the root directory of websites (ex. yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn’t crawl, as well as the speed at which they crawl your site, via specific robots.txt directives.
How Googlebot treats robots.txt files
- If Googlebot can’t find a robots.txt file for a site, it proceeds to crawl the site.
- If Googlebot finds a robots.txt file for a site, it will usually abide by the suggestions and proceed to crawl the site.
- If Googlebot encounters an error while trying to access a site’s robots.txt file and can’t determine if one exists or not, it won’t crawl the site.
Sometimes a search engine will be able to find parts of your site by crawling, but other pages or sections might be obscured for one reason or another. It’s important to make sure that search engines are able to discover all the content you want to be indexed and not just your homepage.
Can search engines follow your site navigation?
Just as a crawler needs to discover your site via links from other sites, it needs a path of links on your own site to guide it from page to page. If you’ve got a page you want search engines to find but it isn’t linked to from any other pages, it’s as good as invisible. Many sites make the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in ways that are inaccessible to search engines, hindering their ability to get listed in search results.
Common navigation mistakes that can keep crawlers from seeing all of your sites:
Having a mobile navigation that shows different results than your desktop navigation
Any type of navigation where the menu items are not in the HTML, such as JavaScript-enabled navigations. Google has gotten much better at crawling and understanding JavaScript, but it’s still not a perfect process. The more surefire way to ensure something gets found, understood, and indexed by Google is by putting it in the HTML.
Personalization, or showing unique navigation to a specific type of visitor versus others, could appear to be cloaking to a search engine crawler
Forgetting to link to a primary page on your website through your navigation — remember, links are the paths crawlers follow to new pages!
This is why it’s essential that your website has clear navigation and helpful URL folder structures.
Webpages that have been discovered by the search engine are added into a data structure called an index.
The index includes all the discovered URLs along with a number of relevant key signals about the contents of each URL such as:
- The keywords discovered within the page’s content – what topics does the page cover?
- The type of content that is being crawled (using microdata called Schema) – what is included on the page?
- The freshness of the page – how recently was it updated?
- The previous user engagement of the page and/or domain – how do people interact with the page?
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is the process of modifying your website so that it can be found by search engines. Websites that are not optimized receive a lower ranking in search engine results pages, and therefore fewer people see them.
In today’s world, we have more ways to search than ever before. Search engines also have more means to evaluate a website than ever before, which is why it’s so important that you optimize your site for any given keyword or phrase.
The benefits of implementing SEO on your website can be varied and wide-ranging. It should come as no surprise that a higher Google ranking will increase the number of visitors to your website, thus increasing opportunities for repeat business and brand recognition.
It’s worth noting that SEO isn’t about tricking Google into giving your website a better ranking. Instead, it’s about giving your website the best chance of being found by Google’s search algorithm.
SEO is ideal for companies that want to increase the visibility of their website and attract more visitors. The best SEO strategy for your business is to target a few keywords with highly optimized, contextual content.
Additionally, go beyond just optimizing your website for Google; other search engines may use different algorithms and may index your content differently.
There are many tools available in the market for improving your website’s performance. SEO tools are web-based applications that help you manage your online visibility and search engine optimization efforts.
They include everything from keyword research and content analysis tools to keyword tracking and rank tracking. SEO tools can help you rank higher in Google, increase your Google traffic, boost your conversion rates and increase your website’s visibility within all of the major search engines.
Some very popular ones are Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and Moz
Check out our article “Most important factors for your successful online presence”
