fbpx
Tap To Call

Houston SEO: Crawlability & Indexability

Houston SEO - Bizopia
Search engine spiders need to be able to crawl and index your web pages for Houston SEO success.

Crawlability and indexability are an important part of technical Houston SEO. In fact, without your website being crawlable and indexable, you likely will not see the rankings and conversion rates you want to achieve for your business. Therefore, it’s important to work with a team that understands how to keep your website crawlable and indexable. 

What does crawlability and indexability mean in Houston SEO?

First, you may be wondering what crawlability and indexability mean. Essentially, these two things are the most basic component of search engine optimization for your website. Crawlability is basically readability to search engines. Search engines have crawlers that go around the web reading content and following links on various web pages. These crawlers are also known as robots, bots, and spiders. 

Once the crawlers crawl, or read, your web page, then the search engine can index the page. Indexing means the search engine can save and analyze the content on your web page and bring it up in search engine result pages. You can see what pages Google has indexed for your website by typing in “site:” followed by your web address. This will pull up all the indexed pages for your website. If you don’t see any results, then your website is likely experiencing issues with crawlability or indexability. 

Therefore, as you can see, without crawlability and indexability, your site may never reach your target audience. Even if you have the best Houston SEO content on the planet, search engines can’t rank your site without crawling and indexing your pages. 

How do I make my site crawlable and indexable to hit my Houston SEO goals?

So, how can you make sure your website is indexable and crawlable? Well, a lot of it comes down to your website. For example, the code in your website can make or break crawlability and indexability. Code errors or even programming techniques can interfere with how search engines crawl and index your website. Therefore, it’s important to start with a modern website built with search engines in mind. 

For example, Ajax programming was a popular tool for programming websites in the past. However, many bots can’t crawl websites created with Ajax techniques. Additionally, there are types of code that can stop crawlers from crawling your website. In some cases, you may put this code on a page (we’ll explain why this is useful later), but it can be easy to accidentally have that code on a web page and prevent search engine crawlers from reading and indexing your pages. Server errors can also make it difficult to crawl and index your site. 

Therefore, you want to make sure that you follow several technical Houston SEO rules to improve crawlability and indexability. First, make sure that your website is up-to-date, uses crawlable code, and that you choose reliable hosting. In addition, there are other things you can do to help optimize your crawl budget, which can help you get your pages indexed more quickly and efficiently. 

Optimizing Crawl Budget

Crawl budget refers to a specific amount of time that crawlers are allotted to spend on your website. After that time is up, they move on to a different website. Therefore, it’s important to make your site as easy as possible to crawl to help streamline the process and maximize this budget. This is especially true because Google doesn’t accept payment for additional crawling or longer crawling. Therefore, the only way to help improve your crawl budget is to take steps to make your website easier to crawl. 

Site Structure

Site structure plays a key role in how search engines crawl and index your site. For example, you want to make sure that you can get to all of the pages you want indexed without having to type in a specific URL. This means using simple navigation structures, a sitemap, and other structural elements to make it easy to navigate through your website. The easier you and your customers can go through your website, the better search engine crawlers can as well. 

Internal Links

Also, bots follow links to discover new pages while crawling. Therefore, you can use internal links to lead crawlers to your important web pages. Internal links can also help create a page hierarchy for your website. Therefore, use internal links to point toward pages with the most Houston SEO value. This can not only help crawlers navigate and understand what your site is about, but also may help improve your rankings in search engine results pages. 

Site Speed

Another way to help maximize the amount of time crawlers spend on your website is to improve site speed. The faster that bots can crawl your page, the more pages they can crawl and index. Therefore, not only do you need valuable Houston SEO content, you also need to ensure it loads quickly. This means using optimized images, prioritizing above the fold content, and taking other steps to speed up load times. 

Disallowing Crawling on Certain Web Pages

As we mentioned earlier, you do have the ability to tell bots not to crawl your site. Most search engines follow this rule. However, you may be thinking it would be crazy to put this code anywhere on your website. Actually, this can be a valuable way to optimize crawl budget. You can use this code to help stop crawlers from spending time on pages that don’t have any Houston SEO value. For example, a thank you page on your website for people who sign up for your email list likely doesn’t have a lot of value for ranking on search engine results pages. Therefore, you can disallow crawling for that page to save time and allow your site’s crawl budget to be spent on more valuable pages. 

Call Your Houston SEO Specialists Today

At Bizopia, we provide high quality digital marketing services to help you achieve higher rankings on search engines to help boost your business. Our team works with businesses in all industries to help you achieve your company’s digital marketing objectives. Whether you need expert Houston PPC management or ongoing Houston search engine optimization efforts, we are here for you. Call us today at (832) 327-3230 to learn more and start getting better results. Don’t forget to fill out our free website evaluation to learn how well your site’s working for you.