You Dont Need a Pokéball to Catch These Crawlers

I’ve been seeing a lot of people wandering around trying to catch all the Pokemon they can on their phones lately. But if you have an ecommerce site, there’s something else that crawls that you would want to capture – web crawlers! Unfortunately, you can’t capture these guys with a Pokeball. These are programs that browse the Internet and provide up-to-date data for search engines to use to rank websites. So if you want customers to choose you, you first have to make it easy for these crawlers to find you. Okay, now that I have your attention and you’ve put your Pokà ©dex down, here are five tips on how to catch more web crawlers. 1. Update Content Regularly Updating your content regularly will get your website crawled more frequently. Having an up-to-date blog with relevant keywords will increase your websites’ search rankings. Additionally, be sure to have high-quality, usable content to add value to your human visitors. 2. Create Sitemaps An effective sitemap will tell search engines about the organization of your site content and help guide crawlers around your website more efficiently. Google has a guide on how to build and submit sitemaps. Some general guidelines include: Using consistent, fully-qualified URLs Having UTF-8 encoded files Breaking up larger sitemaps into smaller sitemaps Using a sitemap index file to list and submit a single file to Google 3. Avoid Duplicate Content Duplicate content are substantial chunks of content that match identically or similarly to content found elsewhere on the same website. Duplicate content will result in less of your website being crawled and can even lower your search engine result. 4. Optimize for Mobile Google will penalize websites that are not mobile-friendly and boost the search ranks of websites that are. Furthermore, mobile users are five times more likely to abandon websites that are not optimized for mobile. A responsive web design is ideal, but a separate mobile website is fine too. Google will not consider mobile sites as duplicate content as long as they are annotated properly. Optimizing for mobile will help your website â€Å"level up† in search ranking. 5. Exclude Pages You Don’t Want Crawled This can be done with robots.txt files and no-follow links. Pages you might not want to be crawled may include back-end folders and pages that don’t add value. Think of robots.txt files as the â€Å"repel† items in the original Pokà ©mon games – they are both used deter crawlers that won’t add to the experience. Lure in the Crawlers Search Engine Optimization is to Web Crawlers as Lure Modules are to Pokà ©mon. Web crawlers are attracted to an optimized website, which in turn will attract more visitors. By following these five tips, your SEO will be super effective!