Until your website appears in Google’s search results, it’s difficult to develop traffic and sales. And until you site is indexed multiple times by Google’s web crawler, Googlebot, it won’t show up in the search results. Frequent return visits by the crawler are necessary to advance in the rankings so your site shows up earlier in searches. The objective of maintaining a website is to generate traffic, so an organized process to make sure your site is crawled frequently is a priority. The good news is that the techniques to get that job done are conventional SEO practices. Taking these steps will both get your site into the search results and, once it’s there, improve your position. The method to keep Google crawling your sites consists of just five simple steps.

1. Add additional content. Fresh content on your website is a magnet both for users and for search engines. The Googlebot loves fresh content and every time it visits your site it looks for it. If there’s nothing there to hold its interest, it might be a while before it comes back to check again. If it detects new stuff, it will return more often. A good example of this are newspaper websites where the content changes consistently, enticing Google to crawl the sites multiple times per day. Update the site whenever it’s logical to do so. Never add content as an end in itself. Always consider the quality of what you’re adding.

2. Use original content. Duplicating content to fill space is counterproductive if you’re seeking to improve your status on Google. The crawler detects duplicate material and may avoid your site if it finds enough of it. If there’s a compelling reason for duplicating information, place the duplicate material on a different page and utilize redirects to refer users to it.

3. Speed up your loading. Just like you, the Google crawler gets impatient with slow-loading sites. When it encounters one it may simply move on to the next site without waiting to see what it missed. This can be very bad for your prospects to earn a decent position in search results. The loading speed of a site carries an increasing amount of weight in the Google algorithm that determines who makes it into search results and how high they are ranked.

4. Map your site. If your website contains a site map, it makes it easier for Google to access all pages of your site. This results in more comprehensive indexing, a great advantage in the competition for a favorable place in the search results. A sitemap simply contains URLs to all the various pages and information on your site. HTML sitemaps are generally favored by Google over the XML equivalent.

5. Cultivate links to your site. The more times the Googlebot stumbles over links to your website incorporated in other sites, the more it will make a habit of returning to crawl your site. These return visits translate into more favorable positioning in search results. Of course, spreading your links far and wide on the web also increases user traffic and sales at your site.

 

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