It is a remarkable technology when you try to understand how the search engine works in indexing a website. As you all are aware that there are greater benefits when compared to receiving organic traffic than paid traffic. This is the reason marketers strive hard to achieve better results organically. And when you have to gain organic traffic, you need to understand what is website indexing and how it works.
Irrespective of the industry that your website is established into. Whether it is a B2B or B2C-based website. Your site needs to be indexed on search engines so that you can get a potential audience and possibly turn out to be valuable clients.
With the introduction of multiple search engine platforms, the competition has been diversifying. It is not like you need to restrict your website from getting indexed down only on the Google search engine. There are other popular search engine platforms known as Bing, Baidu, and other firms.
But if you look at the overall process and the functionality of website indexing remains the same. Without further ado, let us now understand the meaning of what is website indexing and how site indexation works.
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What is website indexing?
Website indexing is the process of the data of web pages from a website getting recorded by a search engine crawler on their server. The indexing of web pages is done so that whenever a potential user types the search query on a search engine and your web page appears on the search result based on the focus keyword.
Basically, the process is initiated when a search engine crawler releases spiders which are also known as artificial intelligence robots. These bots crawl the website and check for the content, media files, and other attributes. The search engine will later decide in which category the website needs to be included. Based on the user’s search query, you can see the website ranking on the search engine.
Why do you need to index your website?
As earlier suggested, if your goal is to get organic traffic then you need to seriously consider getting your website getting indexed on search engines. Here is a list of other benefits that you will be achieving with getting your website indexed.
1. Drive organic traffic
One of the major benefits of getting your website indexed on any search engine is that you can drive organic traffic to the website. As you all know how valuable the organic traffic is for a website because you don’t need to pay any amount to get a user. This is completely opposite when we see the paid traffic as it uses a paid budget to drive traffic.
2. Gain high ROI
By driving organic traffic to your website, you can also get potential leads for your business. It is one of the best approaches if you have to get a better ROI from the marketing efforts. Because you need not pay any other additional amount to get your potential customer on your site.
3. Get better conversion
When we compare the type of traffic that we drive towards the website really matters. Because of the paid traffic, there are high chances for you to gain invalid clicks and users. But when we are comparing the same data with organic traffic, you will receive people who are serious about the solutions that you offer in the market. This results in a better conversion rate compared to the paid campaign source.
4. Improves brand authority
Google and any other search engine have various metrics to determine the quality of a website. Some of the popular metrics are known as page rank, page authority, domain authority, and domain rating. Based on these factors, you can easily calculate the quality of your website. When you have a better quality website, your website starts to appear on every keyword search by the user and through every search engine channel. This instantly boosts your brand authority and gains the maximum exposure that your website can receive.
5. Receive organic backlinks
As the web pages of your website start to appear on the search result, people start to link your blog as a source on their website. It is just not limited to the blog, it can be your solutions, case study, benchmark reports, and other pages. One of the effective ways to receive organic backlinks is when you are able to get your web pages indexed on search engine services.
How does website indexation work?
It is truly amazing when you can see that there are trillions of web pages published on the web and it is continuously getting indexed on a search engine server. Here is a summarised working process of how web indexing works.
1. Publishing your website
The process basically starts with publishing your website for internet users. Whether it can be a personal blog or a business website, you need to ensure that your website is published so that it is easily accessible by search engine robots.
While publishing your website, you need to ensure that there is nothing getting blocked on your robots.txt file. Because this will not allow the search engine to access your website and index it on their server. Ensure that your robots.txt doesn’t contain blockable scripts.
2. Crawling process
When the search engine releases the search engine spider, the crawling process gets initiated. These crawlers are developed on an artificial intelligence platform that expresses all the web pages that have been published on the internet domain.
When crawling for a website, the spider ensures that everything is checked. By following the links that have been published within the website. The links can be from an internal or external source the way web publishers have posted. Based on that the crawler will understand what are the web pages within the website and how are they related to each other.
The crawling process takes a lot of time because there are millions of web pages getting published on a daily basis. So it usually takes from a few weeks to a few months to get your web pages indexed.
Related: What are crawl errors?
3. Understanding the data
After crawling the website, the search engine tries to understand what the website is all about. To smoothen the process, you need to publish a good quality about us page, privacy policy page, and other pages that are relevant to each other.
This makes the search engine understand all the information that is required so that it can categorize your website efficiently. Initially, you need to start your website by focusing on one topic so that you can drive better organic traffic towards your site.
4. Web pages start to get indexed
When the search engine understands what your web pages are all about, it starts to index in their web server based on the classification. Indexing is the process of including the web pages of your website on the search engine database. They categorise it into a separate folder so that it will be convenient for them to display your website on the search result based on the user’s query.
Every search engine company will be having its own servers and the process of indexing a website on their database. Some of the key metrics that are evaluated on the basis of indexation are the motive behind the content that has been published on a website, sitemap integrated for understanding the structure, links used within the web pages to make the content more relevant, and other credentials details that have been published on the website to make it more readable for end users.
5. The web pages start to appear on search result
As the web pages are indexed on a search engine database, the search engine starts to apply different kinds of algorithm to refine the data. In order to display the search result of your website, crawlers need to understand what your content is all about and only then can it display based on the user query.
Determining the relevancy
The basic process starts with determining the relevancy of your web page to the audience. Your web pages are evaluated based on how meaningful it is to the particular user who performed a search query.
Assessing the ranking signals
There are multiple ranking signals that a webpage will possess. It can be the internal links, external links, social media signals, and the backlinks that have been received for the particular web page. When the search engine evaluates all the parameters, it will assess on what position your website needs to be ranked on the search engine result.
Displaying the web page on the search engine result
After clearing all the parameters that have been suggested by the search engine algorithm, you can notice that your web page starts to rank.
What are the challenges faced by search engine crawlers while indexing a web page?
Even though the search engine crawlers are based on an artificial intelligence platform, there are certain limitations that can’t be performed effectively. But they are continuously evolving their platform by optimizing it and making it a more human-centric approach. Here are some of the scenarios in which search robots face challenges.
1. Audio file
If you have attached an audio file on a web page, the search engine will have a hard time determining the content from the audio file. This is the reason you can take the help of the transcript and publish it separately so that the search engine crawler will easily understand what it is about.
2. Video file
The same thing applies even to the usage of video. You can use a detailed transcript and make the search engine understand what the context of the video is all about.
3. Image with heavy text
Search engines can easily decode what is the text within the image, but there is a slight problem when there is the usage of heavy text over the image. Because it will be very hard for the bots to scan the content from the image.
4. Multiple redirects
When a website uses multiple redirects, it is hard for the search engine to understand what the end motive of the webpage content is. Sometimes this is also considered a Black hat SEO practice that needs to be avoided at any cost.
Learn: What is 301 redirect?
5. Usage of flash and iFrames
The usage of flash files is very hard to decode by Google and any other search engine. As it is based on visual format and sometimes based on video type as well, it can’t decode the message from it.
Even when you use the iFrames the within web pages are slightly complex for a search engine to understand the context.
For both the process, you can take the help of alternative text descriptions and the usage of a proper title for the media file. It is one of the best ways to make them understand what the media files are all about.
To sum it up
The process of website indexing is one of a kind. For the layman end-user, the operation of a search engine can look so simple, but if they closely look at the backend process it is more complex. The search engines are continuously evolving and are using advanced parameters to index websites. If you look at the above process, I hope you got clarity on what is website indexing and how web indexation works. The process remains almost the same for all search engine platforms.
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