If you have the most beautifully designed website for your business but it does not show up on any major search engine, then it can be considered a wasted investment. Just having a website is not enough in itself. It is absolutely vital to drive traffic to it and increase the reach of your brand. If you cannot get the big search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo to notice and index your site, then you will not be able to get any organic traffic.
Google and other search engines deal with billions of websites daily. For example, the Google index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes, with well over a million computing hours required to build it. Let’s look at how major search engines index, analyze, and then rank a site.
What Is Web Indexing?
Just like books are registered in libraries under main categories, sub-categories and further alphabetized by authors titles and more, the web too is a continuously growing virtual library with billions of webpage’s and blogs but without a central filing system. The search engines are the index to this library and registering of a webpage or blog is known as indexing. A web index is a database of all the stuff on the Internet, so that search engines know where this information is, and can help searchers find it. Search engines gathers information about the pages during the crawl process and then create a large index of all the pages on all the websites that they are aware of. If your site is on that database, only then can it show up in search results.
The search process is really complex. But putting it simply, during a search on the Google search engine, the algorithms look up the search terms in the index, which includes information about words and their location, to find the appropriate pages. Essentially search engines do two major things to your site: crawling and indexing. Crawling is when a bot fetches a webpage to analyze its contents in order to inform search result details, rank pages, and follow links to discover new pages. Indexing refers to the process when a search engine stores a website’s URL and any relevant information in its database to serve as a search result.
How Do Search Engines Index The Internet?
Search engines such as Google use spiders that are bits of computer code to crawl from site to site in order to gather a web of information that is stored in the index and this process is known as fetching. The web spider follows the chain of links to crawl from a website to the next, constantly indexing its information. Spiders index the most important information first including- URLs, title tags and metadata containing keywords. Spiders are always on the lookout for new page on an existing site, modifications to an existing webpage or an entirely new site or blog.
The spider processes the text on the page along with the location on page including the search terms. When anyone looks for information related to the same keywords in the search engine, the search engines algorithm goes to work deciding where to rank that page among all the other pages related to those keywords. For Google, besides keywords, there are 200 other factors that are also important in deciding the fate of your page rankings, including quality inbound links, social signals and valid code on all your pages.
Benefits Of Search Engine Indexing
So why do you need to get your site optimized to be crawled by spiders and how can it benefit your site?
Attracts Traffic
Having your site indexed by spiders from search engines can increase traffic to your website. When the pages on your site are listed with search engines, it increases the chance of your webpages being displayed in the search results every time a potential customer looks up for some related information in the search engine. With proper search engine indexing, you can expect not just your site but also your webpages to be listed within a stipulated period, which can lead to more people finding their way to your site.
Improves Search Rankings
If your site is well optimized and has informative content related to your industry, with relevant keywords, proper title and descriptions detailing your business then you will definitely see your site rank higher in the SERPs.
Higher Return-On-Investment
Indexing allows you to list webpages and subpages with search engines and directories to improve your chance of attracting the right type of customers to your site. It is possible to target a specific category of customers for the product/services related to your business. Rearranging the site structure and linking the pages properly for indexing helps spiders locate your site easily. When the end user can find the information they are looking for more easily, it improves your site usability. You can track everything from the source of the traffic, leads flowing through the site and even detect demographic information and metrics of engagement to reach the target audience that are looking for your service or products. This in turn boosts your business ROI.
Conclusion
Besides getting their website indexed by Google, businesses should also look at implementing SEO techniques in order to increase their presence on the internet. Indexation is just the beginning. A site optimized for the search engines is more likely to drive more traffic to its website and in turn improve brand awareness.