Every website owner has a goal of reaching a high position in the search engines. After all, the closer you are to that closeted number 1 position, the more money you are likely to make. But in order to rank in the search engines at all, you need to make sure your site gets crawled by what are affectionately known as the search engine spiders. So how can you make your site accessible, improve your SEO, and increase your chances of obtaining a high search engine ranking? Keep reading to find out.
Imagine you had to drive somewhere and had two route options available to you. One of the options was along a highway that was fast, clear, and straight. The other option was along windy, narrow roads, and could lead to you being stuck behind a tractor. Which option would you choose? If you chose the highway, you’re thinking the same as Google. When your site is written with clean code, it makes it much easier and faster for the search engines to index it, making your pages rank highly more quickly.
Going back to the car analogy above, you’ll find it a lot easier to navigate to a new location if you have a map at hand. Google operates in the same way. Create a site map for your website and Google will be able to navigate through all of your posts and pages with ease. If you don’t include a site map, Google will reach your pages through inner links – do you really have the time to ensure every page on your site is linked to each other? If not, read this guide on how to create a site map.
Although Google+ isn’t as popular as other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it is still worth signing up to if you run a business. Google loves to crawl sites that have been shared on its social network, so make sure you share every post or page you publish on Google+. It will help them to get indexed faster, which is especially beneficial if you are writing news related topics.
Link building is not only good for SEO, it’s also a good way of letting people know that your page exists. When Google crawls a website that contains a link to your site, it will index your page at the same time – that’s why sites that have a lot of links directing to them get indexed a lot more often than websites that only have a few. Link building also relates to on-page links as well, so don’t forget to spread the link juice around when writing new blog posts.
If you feel like you have done as much as possible to make your site accessible to the search engine spiders, you can check your progress using Google Webmaster Tools. This will help you see how many of your website’s pages are indexed, and how many have been crawled but not indexed. The higher the figure, the better your website will perform in the SERPs.