Basically, indexing is the method used by Google and other search engines to add your website or blogs into Google search. Indexing is not something most online users, web managers or online marketers tend to give a second thought as to most it seems like a straight forward, automated search engine task. But this isn’t necessarily the case. While search engine indexing is extremely effective, it isn’t flawless.
To fully understand the process of search engine indexing and to help your SEO drive it’s a great idea to complete a digital marketing course to get you up to speed with why you should care about indexing.
How does indexing work?
The search engines receive content of your URL via their crawlers and indexing is the way the search engines make sense of your content, mostly by taking a look at links and keywords. Based on their relativeness not all site pages are indexed. The pages that are allowed to be indexed are called indexable pages.Once the crawling stage is complete and a page has been deemed ‘indexable’ - it is indexed, then that page is in the running to be displayed on the search engine results page, which is exactly where you want your online content to be. This huge database is always growing, and indexing is a necessary part of the search engine being able to list online content the results page once an online search has been entered.
Does getting indexed quickly matter?
So, if all website pages are crawled and then indexed, does it matter whether your site’s pages get indexed quickly or simply waits in the indexing queue. If your site is new or isn’t updated often getting indexed quickly by Google is extremely important for your SEO efforts. Being visible online digital channels and being seen quickly is one of the most important part of digital marketing.Can you control indexing?
Is it possible to influence your site’s indexing, especially with Google? Are you able to help speed up the indexing process? There are a lot of methods, tips and techniques to do this however understanding the process and which method to use is key. Above all else, remember its impossible to reach your digital marketing goals if your pages aren’t indexed and influencing your indexing is something that should not be overlooked if you want to attract as much organic traffic as possible.It’s not an exaggeration to say that a site really has to be of high quality content to get Google’s attention. Like most search engines, Google has guidelines that sites must meet which relate to content quality, authority and trust.
Indexing tips and techniques to speed things along
Now that you’re familiar with the basic understanding of what indexing is and why it is important to your SEO and digital marketing strategy, let’s take a closer look at some tips and techniques that can help speed up the process of your pages being indexed.The very first point of call is to use Fetch as Google before other techniques are used and is a great tool to get your site indexed as quickly as possible. This is a great webmaster tool that allows you to input a URL, evaluate it and submit it to Google for a fresh crawl – brilliant!
Here are a few more indexing tips you can try:
- Use internal links – To enable indexing search engines crawl from page to page through HTML links, an important point when getting your site indexed. Remember your linking pages need to be relevant to one another.
- Include pages in sitemap – Ensure your page is included in your sitemap, while it’s not a guarantee for indexation, it does certainly help.
- Share on Twitter – Twitter is not just a social media platform; it is an extremely helpful resource to get Google to crawl your pages regularly.
- Use external links – A huge boost in your site’s ranking factor is to secure other websites to link to yours and this helps a lot with the indexing of your site.
