Web crawling is when search engines’ spiders visit the websites to update the search engines’ indices. When your site is crawled frequently, the data that the SEs have about your site is often updated, and that means that your new pages and content will be indexed by them. By having more pages on the search engines’ indices, your site will gain more visibility and people will more likely find your site when they search the SEs.

If your site isn’t crawled (meaning that it isn’t indexed by the search engines), then there’s no way that people can see your site in the search engines’ result pages! You have to do something so that the search engines will update the information that they have about your site. By doing so, web surfers, particularly the ones who search the web, will be able to find your site.

Here are five (5) things that you can do so that the web spiders can crawl and index your site’s pages.

1. Make sure that your robots.txt allows spiders to crawl your site.
First of all, the search engines’ spiders will not be able to crawl your site if you do not allow them to do so. You may allow them (and I mean every single search engine!) to crawl your site by replacing everything in your robots.txt file with the one below.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

2. Submit a sitemap.
A sitemap is an overview document which shows how the pages of a site are linked together. Sitemaps can help the surfers of the site to find what they’re looking for. It can also help the search engines to index EVERY page that is in the sitemap, so if you submit your sitemap to the search engines, you’re helping the spiders crawl your site!

If you do not know how to create a sitemap by yourself, use a sitemap generator like this one. When you’re ready to submit your sitemap, start by submitting it to Google.

3. Build content frequently.
When you build content, the search engines will index it as soon as the can. If you publish pages frequently, the spiders will notice it and they will crawl your site more often! Build and publish your content as often as you can and you will see that the SEs will be visiting your site to update their indices.

4. Build backlinks!
As you may know, the spiders crawl every page that they “discover”. Let’s say they’re currently crawling a site, and it has a link to yours. They will crawl all the pages that the site links to, so they will also be able to crawl yours! If you have a lot of backlinks, the spiders will be able to know about your site in no time.

5. Be certain that your site is properly “organized”.
If you have lots of pages but your main page doesn’t link to them, chances are that the search engine crawlers will not be able to index them. Make sure that you link to each and every page that you have published so that the crawlers (or spiders) may be able to find them. Also keep in mind that broken links are definitely no-nos, so you should always double-check your links for misspellings and all those stuff that can make your links broken.

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Link Building FAQs - 4th Batch
• The Big List of Link Building Tactics
• Robots.txt Guide