In the world of SEO, it is sometimes challenging to understand how it all works. That’s why gaining as much knowledge as we can to optimize our websites and reach larger audiences is important. One tool that can help you with this goal is called the web crawler.
What Is A Web Crawler?
A web crawler, or a web spider, is a bot that searches and indexes content on the internet. They are responsible for understanding the content on a web page so they can retrieve it when an inquiry is made. It is being operated by search engines with their own algorithms. The algorithm will tell the web crawler how to find relevant information in response to a search query.
This works by discovering URLs and reviewing and categorizing websites. During this process, they find hyperlinks to other web pages and add them to the list of pages to crawl next. Web crawlers are smart and can determine the importance of each web page.
However, a search engine’s web crawler most likely won’t crawl the entire internet. It will just decide the importance of each web page based on factors including how many other pages link to that page, page views, and even brand authority. In other words, a web crawler will determine which pages to crawl, in what order, and how often they should crawl for updates.
Ultimately, when a web crawler crawls your page, it decides whether your page will show up on the search results for a query.
Why Is It Important?
If one of your goals is for your website to rank in search engines, it needs to be indexed. Without a web crawler, your website won’t be found even if you search for over a paragraph taken from your website. In short, your website cannot be found organically unless it is crawled once.
In order to find and discover links on the web across search engines, you must give your site the ability to reach an audience it is meant for by having it crawled.
If this becomes too confusing, contact Decographic, a digital marketing agency in Miami that can help you with this so you can focus on other aspects of the business.
Benefits of Using Web Crawling Tools
- Doesn’t affect site performance
Site crawlers run in the background, so they won’t slow down your site when in use. It will also not interfere with the day-to-day tasks or influence those browsing the site.
- Built-in reporting
This will save you time since most crawlers have built-in reporting or analytics features that allow you to export reports into excel spreadsheets or other formats.
- Utilizes automation
One helpful feature of web crawlers is that you can set a cadence to have them crawl your site. It will also regularly track site performance without having to manually pull a crawl report each time. By performing regular site audits, a crawling tool is a great way to ensure your site is in good health and ranking as it should.
