SEO and Crawlability

Achieving a first page ranking with google requires excellent optimization. If you want to get as much traffic on your website as possible and be ranked on the first page, some experience with technical SEO is important. SEO: crawlability is one of the most important aspects of optimization you need to know about when optimizing your site.

What does the crawler do?

Search engines are made up of an index and a crawler. A crawler will read your website, following all of the links and will store the content in the index.

The crawler runs constantly, following links on the internet and storing a html version of your website and it’s into the search engine’s index. The index is constantly being updated whenever your website is crawled. How often your website is crawled can depend on a number of factors, including how frequently the content on your website and pages are updated and how important the search engine considers it to be.

Crawlability

Crawlability refers to how easy it is for a search engine to crawl your website. You can block crawlers from viewing your site or specific pages of it. There’s a number of ways to prevent search engines from crawling your website, including blocking the crawler in you robots.txt file, changing the status code in the http header of your site or blocking specific pages of your site with the robots meta tag. By blocking your website or certain pages you are telling the crawler to stay away from that content. In most cases, content on your site that you have blocked in this way will not show up in search results.

If you want to achieve the best Google rankings possible, it is important to make sure Google is easily able to crawl you website and check that you haven’t blocked any content that you want to rank.

Why Crawlability is Important

While crawlability is only one aspect technical SEO, it’s very important to know. If you are unknowingly blocking the search engines from crawling your web site, you won’t be able to achieve a high ranking, so always be sure to double check your robots.txt file and http header to make sure you aren’t blocking any pages you are trying to rank.