One of the major restrictions on the speed at which an SEO campaign can move forward, is how quickly changes to the site are indexed. This is especially true when working with sites that already have some very established rankings and you want to make small changes at a time. If the site is only getting crawled once every couple of weeks this can really slow down the process.
Luckily there are things you can do to increase you websites crawl rate and in turn also have a positive effect on depth of crawl and also rankings, regularly crawled websites are also likely to be crawled a lot deeper meaning lots more pages in the search engine index
So here are five of the most important things you can do to help increase how often your site is visited:
1 ) Increase your pagerank
Not only are links vital for increased rankings, but they also increase the pagerank of your website. A lot of the search engines crawl patterns are dictated by pagerank, with higher PR pages generally being crawled more regularly. But as usual this isn’t the only factor, while you build links to your site there are other things you should be doing.
2 ) Faster and smaller pages
The search engines have to crawl an immensely large amount of data and crawling takes up lots of valuable resource. If you can increase the speed at which your page loads and decrease the size of it you are likely to see benefits from a deeper crawl and an increased in the rate.
3 ) Servers
Make sure you have a reliable server. The last thing you want when the search engines come to visit is for your site to be unavailable. This will seriously hamper how often the search engines come to visit and can also damage your rankings as it leads to a bad user experience.
4 ) Fresh content
One of reasons blogs get indexed so regularly is because they provide a large amount of regularly updated content. This gives the search engines something new to be indexing each time they visit. If you have a static page which you need to remain the same, as is the case with most business sites, then you need to consider ways in which you can integrate regularly updated content into the site. Think of things along the lines of news and articles, latest posts, a twitter feed or some other form of update.
5 ) Duplication
One of the major issues that a lot of sites come across is the damaging effect of duplication on the site. This can lead to a lot of search engine resources being taken up on unnecessary pages and can also lead to indexation and ranking issues. If there are any duplication issues on site you need to sort them out as soon as possible.
Implementing these changes should help increase how often your site is crawled, and if you have a webmaster tools account (you should :)) you will be able to monitor the results.
Image Credit: Kristy
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