What is Crawling & Indexing?
Crawling is the process of search engine bots visiting particular pages on the web. After collecting the information, store it with other crawled pages in the same category. The process of storing the data is known as indexing. When a user enters a search query, search engines go through these indexed pages and show the relevant results. Everyone should understand the search engine working concept before starting the website or blog. It is crucial to make your new website or blog indexed quickly to increase your visibility on search engines. In no particular order, go through the methods below.
Google Webmaster Account:
The foremost step is creating an account in Google webmaster and Analytics. These tools will help you to view your site's crawl stats. Also, the Submit URL option in the webmaster account allows search engines to crawl your site quickly. Finally, the 'Fetch as Google' option asks Google to crawl your new pages or pages with updated content.
Content:
Add fresh content frequently. Use optimized images, flash files, and scripts to reduce site load time. And keep your website or blog responsive because quickly loaded responsive sites are indexed by Google quickly.
Create a Sitemap:
A sitemap is an XML document that contains a list of each page of your website. It helps search engines to identify the pages of your website. Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools using Optimization > Sitemaps and add your sitemap link to notify Google about it. You can use free online tools to create an XML site map. Once you have created a site map, don't forget to mention this as "allow" in the robots.txt file.
Build Links:
Build quality Links to your website and bookmark your URL on popular high PR social bookmarking sites. This lets the search engine index your website when indexing a site linked to it.
Social Profiles & Share Link:
AS I mentioned earlier, search engine crawlers may index your site via other sites. Social media sites are efficient tools to get strong links to your site. Create a strong profile on popular social media sites like Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. Add links to these sites to point to your website and also share your links via status. Even though they are no-follow links, they are considered an essential key element by search engine crawlers for indexing purposes. Besides indexing, social signals can improve your page visibility on Google search results.
RSS Feeds:
Create your RSS feed with Feed burner, which is Google's own RSS management tool. It helps Google understand what you have on your new site. Generally, an RSS feed helps the user get a large amount of content more easily. So apart from indexing, it increases your conversion rate.
Submit to Blog Directories:
Submit your link to top-rank blog directories like Technorati and Alltop, which will help you spread your content among the audience. If your content is quality, it will definitely increase your readership and conversion rate. Also, these directories will give you strong backlinks, which is very important for your site indexing.
Google Alerts:
Most of us use Google alerts for competitor research or to get alerts when a particular product is available like this. But now, you can get a signal from Google whenever your pages get indexed using Google Alerts Tools.
- To set an alert, Go to Google Alerts and type your domain name with the prefix "site" like "site:www.example.com"
- Under options, choose As-it happens to How often and All results for How many. Leave all the other options as default and click Create Alert.
Google indexes many blog posts within hours, but some blogs take days or months. After reading this, I hope you understand these concepts to index your site quickly. Apart from this, many techniques are available to get indexed by search engines. If you have any doubts or want to share other methods, you can leave a comment below.
