6 Simple Tips for Improving Crawlability of Your Website

Crawlability is one of the most important feature for a website that cannot be ignored, if it is to perform better in search engine rankings. Crawlability denotes how easy the search engine spiders are able to crawl the content of the website. A site with good crawlability means that the search engine spiders can easily crawl the website content and hence such sites would show a much better search engine visibility and results. A site with poor crawlability will not have the chances of being highly visible in the search engine result pages and would bring an overall bad search engine performance and a bad SEO output.

Website crawlability factor is mostly ignored while developing a website and it is the prime duty of a SEO specialist to suggest ideas on how the crawlability of the site can be increased. There are a large number of ways by which we can increase the crawlability rate of a website, but it is time consuming to point out all the points.

Here I would like to share some good few points, which I have read from an external source on the net regarding the crawlability of a website. Hope that it would be useful to all.

1) Uploading an XML Sitemap to the Root of the Website
If you have a website, then it is important that you create or generate an XML sitemap and upload it to the root of the website. Uploading an XML file would make it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl the whole part of your website.

2) Clean Navigational Site Structure
While designing a website the SEO must provide suggestions to the web designers and developers to make the site navigational structure as clean as possible. Search engine spiders usually find it easy to crawl a website having a clean and simple navigational site structure.
Ensure navigational structure can be accessed by search crawlers

3) Avoid Excessive Use of Adobe Flash, JavaScript, Ajax etc.
Most of the web site owners makes the serious mistake of including too much Flash, Javascript or Ajax to improve the appearance of their website. By doing this most of the content goes inside the Flash or Javascript and since such file formats are not easily readable by the search engines, your content may get unnoticed by search engines due to the difficulty in crawling them.

4) Use Keyword Rich, Clean and Search Engine Friendly URL Structure
Most of the webmasters uses non SEO friendly URL structure for their website, which decreases their crawlability rate to a great extent. Try using keyword rich, simple, clean and search engine friendly URL structure for your website, so that the search engine spiders can easily crawl the content.

5) Avoid Using Unwanted Scripts in Web Pages
There are a lot of website, which have pages in which a lot of scripts such as CSS codes, Javascript codes etc have been embedded. Avoid doing this and try to call these scripts and functions from an external file as the presence of scripts and functions on a web page prevents the search engine spiders from crawling the content of the website.

6) Upload a Robots.txt File to the Root of the Website
It is always better to upload a well written robots.txt file to the root of the website which has codes that allows the smooth crawling of the website by the search engine spiders.