5 tips to boost your website's indexability

Although keywords and content are the two pillars around which most SEO strategies are constructed, they are far from the only ones that count.

The discoverability of your website is less widely mentioned but equally crucial - not only to people but also to search bots.

On the internet, there are around 50 billion webpages on 1.93 billion domains. This is far too numerous for any human team to investigate, therefore these bots, sometimes known as spiders, play an important role.

These bots determine the content of each page by following links from one website to the next. This data is collated into a massive database, or index, of URLs, which are then ranked by the search engine's algorithm.

Here's how you can improve your website's indexability and crawlability.

Improve page loading speed
Web spiders don't have all day to wait for your links to load since they have billions of webpages to categorize. A crawl budget is another term for this.

If your site does not load inside the set time range, they will go, leaving you uncrawled and unindexed. And, as you can expect, this is not helpful for SEO.

As a result, it's a good idea to review your page performance on a regular basis and optimize it whenever possible.

To test the performance of your website, utilize Google Search Console or applications like Screaming Frog.

Strengthen internal link structure
A well-structured website and internal linking are essential components of a successful SEO strategy. Internal linking is one of the most significant things a website can accomplish since a disordered website is difficult for search engines to crawl.

If your internal linking is weak, you risk having orphaned pages, which do not link to any other section of your website. Because nothing is directed to these sites, search engines can only locate them via your sitemap.

Create a sensible internal structure for your site to eliminate this and other problems caused by inadequate organization.

Your homepage should have links to subpages that are supported by pages below in the pyramid. Contextual links should be placed on these subpages where it feels natural.

Send your sitemap to Google
Google will scan your site if you give it enough time and if you don't tell it not to. That's fantastic, but it doesn't assist your search ranking while you're waiting.

If you've just changed your content and want Google to know about it right away, you should upload a sitemap to Google Search Console.

A sitemap is yet another file in your root directory. It acts as a road map for search engines, offering direct links to all of your site's pages.

This is advantageous for indexability since it allows Google to learn about several sites at the same time.

Always keep your robots.txt updated
You should have a robots.txt file for your website. While it is not essential, 99% of websites do it as a general rule. If you're not acquainted with this, it's a plain text file at the root directory of your website.

It instructs search engine crawlers on how to crawl your site. Its principal function is to regulate bot traffic and prevent your website from becoming overburdened with requests.

Limiting which pages Google crawls and indexes is where this comes in helpful for crawlability. You probably don't want pages like directories, shopping carts, and tags in Google's directory, for example.

Check for low-quality content
If Google does not believe your material is valuable to searchers, it may elect not to index it. Thin content, as it is known, might be badly written material (e.g., loaded with grammatical and spelling problems), boilerplate information that isn't distinctive to your site, or content that lacks external signals regarding its worth and authority.

Determine which pages on your site are not being indexed, then examine the target searches for them. Are they delivering high-quality solutions to searchers' questions? Replace or renew them if necessary.