Search Engine Optimization has become a thriving industry, which isn’t surprising because getting on the front of page of Google is enough to skyrocket any company’s revenue. This is why people are scrambling to crack the code of SEO and Google. Unfortunately, there is a lot of jargon thrown about whenever a discussion about SEO arises, so it is easy to get confused. If you’re new to SEO, two of the more confusing terms that are relevant to SEO are “crawling” and “indexing.”
(Pixabay / FirmBee)
At face value, the two seem almost identical, but in fact, they have distinct differences. In essence, having your website crawled by Google is different than having it indexed because your website needs to be crawled before it can be indexed.
What is Crawling and Indexing?
If your website has been crawled by Google, it means that a Google bot has visited and read through your pages. Using special algorithms, this little bot tries to determine whether or not your page is worthy of being indexed (cataloged) by Google.
If a page is indexed, this means that it can appear in Google search results. In other words, Google has deemed your content worthy to be shown as an answer when people search words that are relevant to your content. How far back in the search results that you show up on will vary greatly based on the quality and uniqueness of your content, as well as how competitive your industry is.
How to Get Crawled by Google
If you want your website to be found by potential users, you will need to get Google to crawl your website first. Multiple methods help you achieve this goal. One of the easiest ways to catch Google’s eye is to upload an XML sitemap to Google Search Console so that Google’s bots can easily identify all of the content on your website.
How to Get Better Rankings
Once your website has been crawled, Google will then determine if your content adds anything of value to the internet. If the bot thinks that your website is beneficial to Google’s user base, then you will be ranked higher.
The entire premise of SEO is to get you better rankings on search engines. Higher rankings = higher clicks = higher sales. Acquiring backlinks, and writing good, authentic articles are all ways to increase your rankings once your site has been crawled and indexed.