7 Tips to Boost Your SEO Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is nothing but the regularity with which Google spiders or bots move over the web pages related to your domain. It is a crucial aspect of SEO but many marketers seem to overlook the same, putting it on the back burner. The optimization of the crawl budget is a sequence of steps that you can implement so that Google bots go over your pages frequently. The more often the bots move over your web pages, the fast they’re indexed, indicating that your website has been updated.
According to an article published on Search Engine Journal, with crawl budget, your SEO attempts will take little time to begin and affect your site rankings in the search engine results pages or SERPs.
There are many ways to optimize your crawl budget. Here is how:
1. Keep an eye on redirect chains
It is essential for ensuring the quality and health of your website and the most common thing to do. Usually, you will like to stay away from having even one redirect chain on your whole domain. The integrity that seems an unfeasible job for a huge website and therefore, 301 as well as 302 redirects are inevitable. You cannot help it.
However, when these chained mutually would certainly damage your crawl limit up to a point where Google or Bing’s crawler may just stop going over your web pages without accessing the page you want to index. Safari SEO Southampton suggests that redirect chains are not only detrimental for Google, but they are also detrimental for the user experience. With the Google page experience update rolling out in May 2021, these metrics will play an increasingly important role in how website rant. Remember that a couple of redirects may not hurt your website, but then it is one aspect that you need to care about, nevertheless. You cannot take page indexing for granted.
2. Letting crawling of your essential web pages in Robots.txt
Though this is obvious, its importance can’t be overlooked, as this is the natural and most important thing to do when it comes to SEO crawl budget. You can manage robots.txt via hand or with some website auditor tool. If you are not sure which tool, research online to learn more about them.
We recommend that you make the best use of a tool whenever feasible because these are easy to use and effectual. All you need to do is integrate your robots.txt to your preferred tool so that you can allow or obstruct the crawling process of any web page related to your domain in just seconds. Next, you can just upload a modified document, and you are set. Bravo!
One can perform this task easily by hand, but seasoned SEO Consulting experts assert that if you have a huge website, in which too many calibrations are required, it is convenient to use a tool to make your job easy and hassle-free.
3. Do not allow HTTP blunders ruin your crawl budget
To be honest, 404 as well as 410 pages damage your crawl budget because they ruin the user experience, which is too bad for your website. With poor experience, Google will push your site down in the SERPs; forget about ranking! That is the reason why you need to address all 4xx as well as 5xx status codes to give you a win-win scenario. The experts in the industry recommend the use of any tool for auditing your website.
You can use Screaming Frog and SE Ranking tools, which professionals use these days for the audit of their websites. Use it and you will benefit.
4. Make the most out of HTML when feasible
We are talking about SEO, crawl budget, and especially Google, whose crawler or bots have become more advanced in moving over JavaScript, and improved in crawling and as well as indexing XML and Flash. When it comes to the other search engines, they did not reach that far. That is the reason why you must opt for HTML and use it whenever feasible. There is no second thought about it.
5. Have you updated your sitemap?
There is nothing like updating and taking care of your XML sitemap. If you haven’t done it so far, do so now. You will benefit if you update your sitemap. Google spiders or bots will find it easy to understand where your site’s internal links direct, a win-win scenario for you. Then, you must use only those URLs, which are canonical for the sitemap, and ensure that it matches up with the latest uploaded edition of robots.txt.
6. Hreflang tags matter a lot
Toexamine your local web pages, Google botsuseHreflang tags. Moreover, you must be informing Google about such localized editions of your web pages with 100 percent clarity.
First things first, employ the <link rel= “alternate” hreflang= “lang code href= “url of page”/> in the header of your web page. Here lang code is that code for a supported language.
Additionally, you must also use the <loc>component for aprovided URL. So this way, you could easilyidentify the localized editions of any web page. If you are not sure, ask any technical SEO expert to do it for you.
7. Focus on URL parameters
It is important to remember that Google crawlers count isolated URLs as different web pages, thus wasting a very useful crawl budget. When you let the search engine giant Google know about such URLs, it would be a win-win scenario for you again, helping you to save your crawl budget, and avoid raising problems related to duplicate content. Therefore, make sure you add these to the Google Search Console account.
Conclusion
Now that you know about these tips to boost your crawl budget, your website needs to be indexed for rankings in the SERPs. It is an essential aspect for all SEO professionals. Ignoring it will damage your crawl budget. Focus on the tips mentioned and try implementing them. If you know about the nuances of SEO, you can work on these ideas yourself; else, you will need the assistance of an SEO professional. After all, your website should rank well in the SERPs so that prospective customers can find your site and visit your web pages to buy your products or services.