If you have a website, you should know the crawl budget and how it can affect your website. A crawl budget can improve your website’s overall performance, but what exactly is a crawl budget, and how does it work? Keep reading to learn more about crawl budgets and how you can use crawl budget to your advantage.
What is a crawl budget?
A crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine crawls and indexes from your website. It’s essentially how much “traffic” you’re giving to the search engines. You want to make sure you don’t give them too much, or else they’ll start penalizing you for overwhelming their servers, but you also want to make sure you’re giving them enough so your site can be indexed appropriately. It’s essential to use the crawl budget to your advantage because if you have a lot of pages that aren’t being indexed, it could be hurting your website’s visibility in search results.
You can use the crawl budget to determine how often you should add new content to your website and how frequently you should audit your website for broken links and other errors that could prevent pages from being indexed.
How can you optimize your crawl budget?
When you’re looking to optimize your website, the crawl budget is something you should consider. After all, if your site isn’t being crawled as much as it could be, that means essential pages and content will not be paid attention to. Here are a few tips for optimizing your website’s crawl budget. First, check for crawl errors and fix them. If there are errors on your site preventing Google from crawling it properly, fixing them will free up some of that budget and help improve your ranking.
Second, optimize your page titles and meta descriptions. Making sure these two elements are well written, and keyword-rich can help increase your chances of being found in search engine results pages (SERPs). Third, publish fresh content regularly. One of the best ways to get crawled more often is to publish fresh content. This tells Google (and other search engines) that your site is worth frequently visiting, resulting in better rankings over time. Fourth, use internal linking strategically. When you link to other pages on your site from within content, you’re telling Google that those pages are important and worth crawling.
Lastly, leverage external links wisely. External links can also be used to tell Google which pages on other websites are worth visiting, but make sure those links come from high-quality sources, or else they could hurt your ranking.
How do you set up a crawl budget?
There are many types of businesses that use crawl budgets. Any business that wants to rank in Google and preserve their site’s health should utilize a crawl budget. ECommerce businesses are among the most common companies using crawl budgets. These businesses have a lot of pages on their site, and they want to make sure that all of their pages are crawled and indexed by Google. They also want to preserve their site’s health, so they use a crawl budget to ensure that their area is being crawled healthily.
Another type of business that uses crawl budgets is businesses with a lot of blog content. Companies with many pages need to be careful with their crawl budgets because if they crawl too many pages, their site’s performance may be impacted. Additionally, these businesses may not be able to crawl all of their pages regularly, so they need to find a way to prioritize which pages are the most important. A crawl budget helps ensure that blog content is properly indexed and ranked in search results.