SEO Cape Town Crawl Budget Guide
In this SEO Cape Town Guide, we look at the crawl budget. For smaller sites, and we mean less than a thousand pages, this is very rarely an issue. Usually larger sites are affected by this more and we mean the size of Amazon as an example, but if there are crawl issues when looking at smaller sites this may be a technical SEO issue worth investigating.
In this Crawl Budget For SEO Cape Town Guide, we’ll look at how large websites need to focus on the crawl budget in order to ensure that the right amount of pages is being crawled. When Googlebot encounters issues with resources or server errors, it may mean an issue for your SEO in the long run, what isn’t crawled cannot be indexed. Trust an SEO company to show you how to optimise crawling and indexing of you website.
Let’s explore what it means to your website and how you can optimize it in the best way possible.
A Crawl Budget Definition For Our SEO Cape Town Guide
For those who don’t really have much awareness of what a crawl budget is, it’s a term that’s used within the SEO Cape Town industry to help show the number of concepts and systems that the search engines use. It helps to decide on how many pages and the pages in particular that it will focus on.
Search engines will assign a crawl budget to websites due to their limited resources. As a result, they need to divide the attention across millions of websites that exist on the internet.
By assigning a crawl budget, it can help to prioritize the crawling that is made depending on the website itself. It sounds confusing, but in a nutshell, crawl budget is the amount of attention the search engines give to your website.
So How Is A Crawl Budget Assigned?
Many SEO Cape Town experts will tend to neglect the crawl budget when it comes to optimization. However, if your website has hundreds and thousands of pages, then a crawl budget management can be ideal. So how is a crawl budget assigned?
There are two elements to consider, and these are the crawl limit and crawl demand.
A crawl limit is how much a website can handle when it comes to crawling. There also has to be some consideration in terms of the owner’s preferences and what they see as the limit.
A crawl demand is picking out which URL’s are important to crawl the most, which can be factored by its level of popularity and how often or not it’s being updated.
It’s important to have your most important pages and those that are more influential where possible. Crawl budget isn’t just limited to pages either, it could be other documents like PDF’s, for example, that might be incorporated into the website.
Putting These Factors Into Practice
With both crawl limit and crawl demand, it’s good to see how these are put into practice. Whether you’re attempting to do this yourself or outsourcing it to an SEO, Cape Town based company, it’s important to know how it all works. So let’s start with the crawl limit, shall we?
Crawl Limit
The crawl limit when it comes to crawl budget is important because search engine crawlers have been made and designed to avoid overloading a web server with too many requests.
In order for the search engines to prevent overloading, they are influenced by a certain number of factors. These can include a platform that might not be performing well and perhaps has a lot of URLs that are timing out or have server errors.
There’s also the number of websites that might be running on the host itself. If your website, for example, is running on a shared host, then it might mean you’ve got a limit when it comes to the crawl budget. This can be a hindrance to your website, and so it might be worth looking to operate solely when it comes to hosting.
Shared hosting can be problematic when it comes to a crawl budget, and you should also think about separate mobile and desktop sites. These will have a shared crawl limit as well that you should keep in mind when it comes to your website.
Crawl Demand
There are pages on your website that are going to be more popular than others, and so when you’re thinking about crawl budget and the crawl demand, you need to understand an URL’s worth.
Just like the crawl limit, there are varying factors that play into crawl demand, and these are also worth knowing, of course.
As mentioned, popularity is a dominating factor, and this is determined by how many inbound internal and external links that the URL has. It also depends on the number of queries that it ends up ranking for as well.
It’s also looked at from the perspective of how often it’s updated and the type of page it is. Is this page likely to change, or is it going to remain the same? It’s worth going with pages that change quite often and therefore need to be crawled more frequently.
Should You Care About Your Crawl Budget?
Even though some SEO Cape Town experts would think otherwise, crawl budget is important to focus on. It has just as much of an impact on your SEO as any other element of it does. It’s important that your website is seen by the search engines and that they help to acquire as many of your indexable pages as possible.
In order to keep your website ahead of the competition, every new page or update to existing ones should be picked up by the search engines quickly, and the more time you spend on crawl budget, the quicker they get.
Indexing your webpages is essential, and that’s only going to happen if you’re taking advantage of your crawl budget.
But when would you not need to worry about your crawl budget for SEO Cape Town? It might not be as relevant if you don’t have a large website. If your website has under 10,000 web pages, it’s likely to dismiss the crawl budget until you surpass that.
And although that might be something you won’t think you’ll reach anytime soon, you’ll be surprised how quickly it starts to creep up.
SEO Cape Town Guide: How To Optimize Crawl Budget For Your Website
Now comes the important bit. How do you optimize the crawl budget for your website? There are a number of helpful tips worth following, and this guide will show you seven of those tips to get you started.
Crawl Your Most Important Pages
It’s an obvious one, but you want to get your most important pages crawled first. This is something that can be done by a website auditor tool. There are many of these about, so it’s worth looking at what’s available and what works well for you. Whichever you pick, it will be effective in allowing you to pick and choose what is crawled and what isn’t. You could do this all by hand, but when you have a large website to contend with, you might not want to take on such a mammoth task.
A tool that can do the work quickly and easily is a much better option to pick!
Avoid Low-Quality Content
No one should be choosing to publish low-quality content nowadays. The worst thing you can do for your website is to spend a lack of effort on your content, and it’s better to not publish anything at all than to put out content that’s poor.
Pages that have very little content or lack good grammar and SEO-friendly features aren’t going to be of much interest when it comes to those search engines. You want to avoid the creation of low-quality content wherever possible.
Anyone with SEO Cape Town knowledge will tell you that high-quality content is key for ranking well on search engines.
Use HTML Where You Can
Not every search engine is like Google, and so it’s important that you’re making accommodations for those search engines. As opposed to Google, where their crawler has become more efficient in crawling most types of pages and documents, others need a bit more help.
With that being said, it’s good to stick to HTML as and where you can and avoid anything else. This is going to help crawl as many pages as possible.
Be Wary Of HTTP Errors
Your website should have no HTTP errors whatsoever, but sometimes they can crop up without you really being aware of it. Unless you’re checking actively for these, they can often go under the radar.
With that being said, though, these 404 and 410 pages can end up eating into your crawl budget if you’re not careful. That’s something you don’t want to happen because not only that, but it can end up affecting the user’s experience on your website.
There’s nothing quite like going onto a website for the first time and seeing a page that doesn’t work. It’s good to use any type of tool that suits you in order to fix these and to stay on top of them.
Update Your Sitemap
Your sitemap acts as a roadmap, and therefore, it’s important to update it as and when you can. The bots for crawl budgets will have an easier time in finding where your internal links lead if you’ve updated your sitemap.
Prevent Duplicated Content
Like low-quality content, duplicated content isn’t something you want to make a habit of either. Just as the HTTP errors eat up your crawl budget, these duplicated pages can also do the same thing.
You can try to minimize or prevent the duplicated pages by setting up website redirects where possible. You should disable any dedicated pages for images and be active in your awareness of other technical steps to make when it comes to preventing duplications.
Broken and redirecting links
When it comes to SEO Cape Town, there are plenty of practices you can do yourself when it comes to making small fixes and changes. These can include broken and redirecting links, as they can be great to rectify for your crawl budget.
Broken links and any redirecting links can be like dead ends when it comes to the search engines. It’s important to avoid any of these on your website, and there’s plenty of tools you can use to monitor these.
If you’re able to fix broken links as and when they happen, it will certainly help with your crawl budget. Look at what tool you’re using and do your best to retain any links to their homepages if it’s a certain webpage that isn’t working. It’s still important to have a healthy amount of external links on your website.
If the link is no longer needed, then you can simply delete it. This is better than leaving it and it becoming a dead link.
How do you increase your SEO Cape Town website’s crawl budget?
In order to increase your website’s crawl budget, you want to increase the authority of your website. This is done by getting your website’s link used by other external websites, as this increases domain authority. The higher your domain, the more crawl budget you’ll get.
Domain authority goes hand in hand with changes that you make to your SEO Cape Town features anyway. Link building is always a good thing to do and invest in your website because the more backlinks you can have to your website, the better.
In this Crawl Budget SEO Cape Town Guide, we’ve explained everything from how it works for your website and what you can do to optimize it. It’s pretty fair to say that it’s critical to utilize crawl budget management when you have a large website.
If your website isn’t quite up to that 10,000+ pages, then it’s worth keeping an eye on it regardless as you may certainly need to work on it in the future. Crawl budget optimization is still relevant to improve your website’s presence on the internet. And whether you’re doing it for your business or it’s a website you run as a hobby, it’s important to be seen on the internet.
Utilize these tips that have mentioned in this guide to optimize your crawl budget and to improve the overall SEO performance of your website.