One of the most important elements of search engine optimization, often overlooked, is how easily search engines can discover and understand your website.
This process, known as crawling and indexing, is fundamental to your site’s visibility in search results. Without being crawled your pages cannot be indexed, and if they are not indexed they won’t rank or display in SERPs.
In this article, we’ll explore 13 practical steps to improve your website’s crawlability and indexability. By implementing these strategies, you can help search engines like Google better navigate and catalog your site, potentially boosting your search rankings and online visibility.
Whether you’re new to SEO or looking to refine your existing strategy, these tips will help ensure that your website is as search-engine-friendly as possible.
Let’s dive in and discover how to make your site more accessible to search engine bots.
1. Improve Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed is crucial to user experience and search engine crawlability. To improve your page speed, consider the following:
Upgrade your hosting plan or server to ensure optimal performance.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to reduce their size and improve loading times.
Optimize images by compressing them and using appropriate formats (e.g., JPEG for photographs, PNG for transparent graphics).
Leverage browser caching to store frequently accessed resources locally on users’ devices.
Reduce the number of redirects and eliminate any unnecessary ones.
Remove any unnecessary third-party scripts or plugins.
2. Measure & Optimize Core Web Vitals
In addition to general page speed optimizations, focus on improving your Core Web Vitals scores. Core Web Vitals are specific factors that Google considers essential in a webpage’s user experience.
These include:
To identify issues related to Core Web Vitals, use tools like Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report, Google PageSpeed Insights, or Lighthouse. These tools provide detailed insights into your page’s performance and offer suggestions for improvement.
Some ways to optimize for Core Web Vitals include:
Minimize main thread work by reducing JavaScript execution time.
Avoid significant layout shifts by using set size attribute dimensions for media elements and preloading fonts.
Improve server response times by optimizing your server, routing users to nearby CDN locations, or caching content.
By focusing on both general page speed optimizations and Core Web Vitals improvements, you can create a faster, more user-friendly experience that search engine crawlers can easily navigate and index.
3. Optimize Crawl Budget
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages Google will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. This budget is determined by factors such as your site’s size, health, and popularity.
If your site has many pages, it’s necessary to ensure that Google crawls and indexes the most important ones. Here are some ways to optimize for crawl budget:
Using a clear hierarchy, ensure your site’s structure is clean and easy to navigate.
Identify and eliminate any duplicate content, as this can waste crawl budget on redundant pages.
Use the robots.txt file to block Google from crawling unimportant pages, such as staging environments or admin pages.
Implement canonicalization to consolidate signals from multiple versions of a page (e.g., with and without query parameters) into a single canonical URL.
Monitor your site’s crawl stats in Google Search Console to identify any unusual spikes or drops in crawl activity, which may indicate issues with your site’s health or structure.
Regularly update and resubmit your XML sitemap to ensure Google has an up-to-date list of your site’s pages.
4. Strengthen Internal Link Structure
A good site structure and internal linking are foundational elements of a successful SEO strategy. A disorganized website is difficult for search engines to crawl, which makes internal linking one of the most important things a website can do.
But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Google’s search advocate, John Mueller, had to say about it:
“Internal linking is super critical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.”
If your internal linking is poor, you also risk orphaned pages or pages that don’t link to any other part of your website. Because nothing is directed to these pages, search engines can only find them through your sitemap.
To eliminate this problem and others caused by poor structure, create a logical internal structure for your site.
Your homepage should link to subpages supported by pages further down the pyramid. These subpages should then have contextual links that feel natural.
Another thing to keep an eye on is broken links, including those with typos in the URL. This, of course, leads to a broken link, which will lead to the dreaded 404 error. In other words, page not found.
The problem is that broken links are not helping but harming your crawlability.
Double-check your URLs, particularly if you’ve recently undergone a site migration, bulk delete, or structure change. And make sure you’re not linking to old or deleted URLs.
Other best practices for internal linking include using anchor text instead of linked images, and adding a “reasonable number” of links on a page (there are different ratios of what is reasonable for different niches, but adding too many links can be seen as a negative signal).
Oh yeah, and ensure you’re using follow links for internal links.
5. Submit Your Sitemap To Google
Given enough time, and assuming you haven’t told it not to, Google will crawl your site. And that’s great, but it’s not helping your search ranking while you wait.
If you recently made changes to your content and want Google to know about them immediately, you should submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
A sitemap is another file that lives in your root directory. It serves as a roadmap for search engines with direct links to every page on your site.
This benefits indexability because it allows Google to learn about multiple pages simultaneously. A crawler may have to follow five internal links to discover a deep page, but by submitting an XML sitemap, it can find all of your pages with a single visit to your sitemap file.
Submitting your sitemap to Google is particularly useful if you have a deep website, frequently add new pages or content, or your site does not have good internal linking.
6. Update Robots.txt Files
You’ll want to have a robots.txt file for your website. It’s a plain text file in your website’s root directory that tells search engines how you would like them to crawl your site. Its primary use is to manage bot traffic and keep your site from being overloaded with requests.
Where this comes in handy in terms of crawlability is limiting which pages Google crawls and indexes. For example, you probably don’t want pages like directories, shopping carts, and tags in Google’s directory.
Of course, this helpful text file can also negatively impact your crawlability. It’s well worth looking at your robots.txt file (or having an expert do it if you’re not confident in your abilities) to see if you’re inadvertently blocking crawler access to your pages.
Some common mistakes in robots.text files include:
Robots.txt is not in the root directory.
Poor use of wildcards.
Noindex in robots.txt.
Blocked scripts, stylesheets, and images.
No sitemap URL.
For an in-depth examination of each of these issues – and tips for resolving them, read this article.
7. Check Your Canonicalization
What a canonical tag does is indicate to Google which page is the main page to give authority to when you have two or more pages that are similar, or even duplicate. Although, this is only a directive and not always applied.