In our earlier piece, we had established the basic concept of what is a Googlebot and what are they points of distinction between crawling and indexing. You can find the related content here.
Now, since the basic concepts are clears, let us delve further into how you can get your new website discovered through google’s search engine.
The framework ahead would discuss more about how a web page administrator can get sitemaps on the web page or website as a whole and how to provide for links that would assist the Googlebot discover your page through content.
Without further ado, let’s talk about the best practices to lure Googlebot to crawl and index your webpage. Bonus: Included a few tricks and tips on how you can divert referral traffic to your website as well.
- Develop and publish a sitemap
First, what is a sitemap?
A sitemap is simply a .xml formatted document on the server on which your website is hosted. This document’s sole purpose in life is to list each of your web page on your website. This typical document provides search engine crawlers like the Googlebot with information pertaining to the time when new web pages have been added and at what frequency should the crawler revert to check for fresh updates on web pages.
For instance, if you are an online retailer and have a live product catalog published on your website with prices and product details being updated on almost a daily basis, the xml file will inform the web crawler that it should visit the website at an average frequency of 24 hours. This frequency can be even lesser or more frequent. Pro tip: If you have built your website on WordPress, installing the ‘Google XML sitemaps’ plugin will help in having a automated process for the creation and refreshing of the sitemap. This can be accessed and used by you and can be submitted to search engine crawlers as well.
- Submission to Google WebMaster
Once you have your sitemap ready, the next step would be to submit it through google webmaster tools. In case you don’t have a google webmaster tools account, you can easily sign up for one by first signing up for a free google account. Once you have your google webmaster tools account in place, you can add your new website to google webmaster.
How to add it? Simple, once you log into your google webmaster tools account, click on the ‘optimization’ option and then the ‘sitemaps’ link. You will now be able to add your website’s sitemap to the google webmaster. This will intimate google and consequently Googlebot about the details needed for indexing. Brownie points for creating an account with Bing! And submitting the sitemap to the Bing! WebMaster Tools.
- Google Analytics
Google analytics is a platform for you to monitor all traffic and view detailed activities performed by users on your website. While this is majorly for monitoring and analyzing website statistics, it also adds heft to the fact that your website is taking efforts and just adds you to googlebot’s radar.
- Generate new social profiles and keep it alive
As you would have already understood by now, web crawlers like Googlebot reach your website by fetching and parsing through related links. So, after the search engines, what type of websites get the most traffic? Social networking websites! The best way to guide the Googlebot to your direction is by being available in the fields they wander the most on – social media websites.
Just creating an account on popular social networking websites like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, google+, pinterest and even on YouTube and maintaining it well can work wonders. Just imagine your company profile and website link being all over social networking websites and these profiles being actively managed; what makes you think that such presence will go unnoticed?
What? Do you really think that's all we had in our "Secret Cheat-Sheet: Make google crawl your website faster and better" docket? You are grossly mistaken. Click here to continue reading. The best is yet to come.
