There's a saying that doing SEO today is like playing an open-world game that's designed to give players an overwhelming number of things to do. You start out tackling the main quest, but before you know it you end up lost among the countless side quests. SEO today is much the same, because the elements that get a website ranked on the first page aren't just one or two things. Simply put, SEO has now become an "overwhelming workload"—as soon as you finish improving one part, the next day you have to go and adjust another part. We can be sure that many people working as an SEO Specialist run into this kind of loop until they feel more than a little dazed.
Search Indexation is another important factor in improving a website according to SEO best practices that many new marketers tend not to give much importance to (What is Google Indexing? Read more in this article). Whatever the reason may be, this could become the small starting point that turns into a major obstacle blocking a website's path to the first page—whether that's falling rankings or dropping traffic. So in this article we'll share 8 tips you should consider for improving your website for Indexing. If you're ready, let's take a look.
1. Monitor your Crawling status with Search Console
The easiest way to check for errors related to Indexing is to regularly monitor your Crawl status by using Google Search Console at least every 30–60 days, in order to identify any errors that occur and fix those issues in a timely manner.
The problems most commonly found are as follows:
2. Your website must be Mobile-Friendly
Of course, Google's Mobile-First-Indexing approach has already been officially announced, so it's time for every SEO marketer to follow this approach, undeniably. Improving a website to support display on desktop alone is no longer enough, because if a website doesn't display well enough on mobile devices—whether that's content that gets dropped, a site that loads slowly, lags, or stutters, or anything else that creates a poor experience for users—Google may not be able to gather the data on your website to use for ranking.
Here are some recommendations for optimizing your website so it's well suited to display on mobile:
- Optimize the website according to Responsive Web Design best practices
- Use Meta Tag commands in your content
- Reduce various On-Page Resources, such as CSS and JavaScript
- Add tags with AMP cache
- Carry out Image Optimization
- Reduce UI elements
- Use PageSpeed Insights to improve load speed
- Don't forget to test your website on mobile devices regularly
3. Update your content regularly
Many SEO experts advise that having a website that updates its content regularly will also help the Search Engine algorithm gather more data on your website.
4. Don't forget to submit your XML Sitemap to the Search Engine
One of the best tips for Indexing is to submit your Sitemap to the Search Engine. For Google, you use Google Search Console, while for Microsoft you use Bing Webmaster Tools.
5. Reduce Duplicate Content
Having a large amount of duplicate content can significantly slow down the rate at which the Search Engine algorithm gathers data. The solution is to use a Canonical Tag to tell the algorithm which page should be Indexed in cases where the website has duplicate content, and to prevent the page with duplicate content from appearing in the SERPs.
Because if this Canonical Tag isn't specified, the algorithm will automatically choose at random which page of the website to Index, which could be detrimental to your SEO.
6. Reduce On-Page Resources and improve Load Times
A website with too many resources, without reducing their size or removing unnecessary files, will create problems for the algorithm that comes to gather data for Indexing—especially various Backend elements such as JavaScript, CSS files, as well as image and video files.
You first have to understand that, on one hand, these files may help make a website look more appealing—that's true—but on the other hand they also become the culprit that burdens performance in other areas. So if you want your website to be crawled by the Search Engine algorithm, don't forget to make sure that any unnecessary files have been deleted or compressed and reduced in size.
7. Don't forget to use Noindex Tags
When improving your website, you may find that there are some pages you don't want Google's algorithm to Index for the purpose of evaluating your website's ranking—for example, pages with Duplicated Content, or for any other reason.
To prevent Google's algorithm from coming in and Indexing them, the most popular approach is to mark those website pages with the noindex tag, which can be done easily through Screaming Frog or the Yoast plugin on WordPress.
8. Set your Crawl Rate
Setting your Crawl Rate means determining the rate at which Googlebot gathers data and sends it to your website. In cases where you find that your website has Indexing issues, try adjusting the Crawl Rate up or down using the following method:
- Go to the Crawl Rate Setting page
- If it states "Calculated as Optimal," that means if you want to lower the Crawl Rate you'll have to submit a request to Google
- If it doesn't say "Calculated as Optimal," then you can adjust it as you wish, and this new Crawl Rate will remain in effect for 90 days
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