SEO - The Technical Bits

SEO Technical: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking

SEO technical are as important as content creation and content building. This in fact is integral to your SEO activities. Search Engines should be able to crawl your site efficiently so that it can be properly ranked. A website is considered accessible website when all the target pages will be indexed and have the chances to rank for the relevant target keywords. There are basically three main areas:

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking

Crawling

While crawling, the main thing you need to consider first is that the search engines are able to crawl all the pages you have targeted it to. There are ways to make a website crawl able and also there can be some potential problems as well.

Good / user friendly site architecture

User friendly and good website architecture means that it is good for users as well as the search engines. The home page which is the main linked page can easily take the viewers to what they are looking for in a click or two: A. Normally, your homepage will be the most linked to and hence can help flow a lot of rankings throughout the entire site; B. It will make it easy and quick for the users to find the most relevant page and conversion to sales happens easily.

Crawl budget

Google is said to assign a crawl budget to every domain they crawl based on the amount of Page Rank. Google may want to find as much content, but they only have a certain level of resource to crawl especially for a site which is ever increasing. Hence they need prioritize and are selective of the crawls to ensure that all the good contents are crawled.

Controlling the crawl

Inserting more quality links to your website can improve the ranking of your page. And you will obviously be doing it.

You can use META tags to define how Google would crawl your website. These are obviously placed in the header section of your page. They can:

• Indicate Google not to index the page
• Instruct Google that it can now crawl any links on the page
• Also instruct whether an image is to be indexed or not.
• You can also modify whether Google should the snippet in its searches
• All of the above

SEO - The Technical Bits

Index Status

Google Webmaster Tools has a nice feature called index status. This gives us insight on how Google is crawling your site and indexing the URLs in your website. It also gives an idea of all the pages you have submitted, how many pages in it Google is choosing not to index.

If Google finds pages which are similar or kind of redirected it might not index it. Now, say you are continuously adding links or pages to your website, and you see a gradual increase in the pages indexed. This probably means that your pages are being crawled and indexed correctly. Otherwise, if you see a significant and unexpected drop then it may point to some problems and which means that the search engines are not able to crawl or access your website properly and efficiently.

SEO - The Technical Bits

Ranking

Rankings are the part we are all concerned about regarding our website and SEO activities. Whether our pages ranking as well as they should or as much as we want them to be? We hire SEO services to always work on getting our pages ranked higher than they currently.

Firstly, it is important that you find out how many pages on your website you are trying to get traffic. These will most likely be your homepage, products, and content and categories pages. Now depending on your website structure you can:

• See the number of URLs in your Sitemap
• Your SEO Company or developer can give you the number
• Crawling your website can also be done but inaccessible pages will not figure in it.

After you have the number, use Google Analytics to figure out the number of pages are getting relevant organic traffic through keyword searches.

It is important to mention that you select the organic searches only by a bif range of date, around six months or so. Then see how many pages received traffic.

You might be losing out on potentially traffic if the number that generates is less than the number of pages you have in your site for which you want traffic.

Now that you have the list of pages for which you are not receiving traffic you can fix the issue and see what went wrong. To do so, you can:

• Make a dedicated sitemap putting in only these URLs and quantify how Google is indexing them
• Go to your server logs and filter them for these URLs to see if they are even crawled
• Check the cache to see if they are cached

• Blogging - Whether your site has a blog or not and whether there are social media sharing buttons or not are checked and reported. It tries to maximize your blogging effort.
• SEO - On page and off page SEO rankings like back links, metas, tags, titles are checked and reported here.
• Social Media - How well your social media accounts links to your site that is Facebook, Twitter etc is linked to your site is evaluated here.
• Mobile - This section helps you evaluate and preview the mobile and tab versions of your site and helps you to adhere to the same.
• Lead Generation - the effectiveness of your landing page in generating leads are captured here. Whether effective use of forms is done or not to capture leads are documented here.