When it comes to your online presence, you’ve got to be seen in order to be heard. Reliable web hosting in Canada like the type we’ve been providing for customers for years here at 4GoodHosting will have you set up and open for business along the Information Superhighway, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be especially visible to prospective visitors moving along it. A site that is properly indexed is going to be optimally situated alongside the highway, and that’s what you want for yours - especially if it’s the primary resource for e-commerce interests.
So what we’ll look at here today is 5 very doable tips that can improve the indexing of your website, and what you’ll likely find is that you don’t need to the most knowledgeable of webmasters to do them. Plus, the good thing is that you don’t need anything more than the same web browser you’ve always used to be able to test the effectiveness of what you’ve done.
Let’s get right to them, because it’s fairly important to ensure that Google can index and read your website easily.
Be Welcoming for Bots
When Google’s bots crawl over your website, they’re looking to access information about what your website covers, how fresh the information is, and how authoritative and trustworthy you are for whatever subject it is you’re presenting yourself. This is a big part of what goes into Google presenting your website as a relevant result when web searchers search for information.
Before we get to our tips for improving website indexing, we should maybe go over the ‘crawling’ part of all of this for anyone who might not be as tech savvy as others here.
What does ‘Site Crawling’ Entail?
Creating the website is only just the first part of the equation. You then need Google to index it to determine how and when it will be displayed to searchers. ‘Bots’ or ‘Crawlers’ are the automated programs that browse the web for content to index and these programs add information to Google’s index. There’s then an algorithm that determines which relevant information makes the cut to be served up in response to individuals Google searches.
Making sure that your website is appropriately structured is the best way to help Google index your information correctly. Basic approaches that everyone uses are to utilize tags and other search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to make clear the topic and focus of your site.
5 Tips for Better Site Indexing
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Use HTML to Maximize Crawling
Plain and simple, the best coding language for building websites is HTML and that doesn’t look like it will be changing anytime soon. Google has made advances with crawling Flash, XML, and Javascript, but it still has a long way to go. Other search engines other than these ones aren’t even on the radar.
So it’s best for you to focus on having your site created in HTML. By doing so you’ll be sure to be indexed correctly no matter what search engine your prospects are using to find information.
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Repair Broken and Redirected Pages
Any page that generates a 400-based or 500-based error code (like 404 or 503, the most common ones) not only impedes the ability of search engines to understand your site, but they also don’t make a very favourable impression on prospective visitors to you site - also known as the people you’d like to keep around to turn them from prospective visitors in t prospective customers.
Using a website audit tool is highly recommended here. One that will help you identify these types of errors and point out broken links and other problems. Taking care of your sitemap is also a good idea, making sure it’s up-to-date with changes to make it so that those bots easily understand where your internal links direct to.
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Maximize SEO
Once you’ve done what’s needed in regards to the technical aspects of the website, you now need to focus on content. Learn SEO strategies that will help drive traffic and show search engines what keywords are most relevant to what it is you have to offer. This helps ensure your website shows up when prospects are looking for information, products, and services that you offer.
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Maximize Tags
Tags that provide summaries of your content are an integral part of effective SEO. For example, the Title Tag informs search engines as to the title of a blog post, and the Meta Description gives a short summary - including the primary keyword always - on what the post is about.
These are the best practices for tags:
- Title Tag: Between 50-60 characters with keywords near the beginning
- Meta Description: In the vicinity of 160 characters and with keywords that will promote click-throughs into your site proper
- Image Tags: Name image with keywords and provide image height and width
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Use Right Keywords
Keywords are not to be located just anywhere in your site content. Instead, they should be placed strategically throughout your blog content and web pages. Doing research to determine what relevant terms receive the most search traffic is very basic and it’s well worth the subscription cost to use an online keyword research too.
You should also ensure that you choose keywords that aren’t too competitive. If you go with ones that are competitive (and the competitiveness of a keyword will be shown to you with a paid keyword research tool) then ranking on page one like you’d hoped is probably not going to happen.
