Technical SEO: Understanding Crawling, Analyzing, and Indexing

In an ever-evolving digital landscape, SEO remains a critical aspect of online visibility and success. Previously, I’ve outlined the four aspects of SEO, underscoring the dynamic nature of this field. The reasons for these continuous changes include:

The evolving impact of SEO and the lack of updates to past implementations.
The constant emergence of new technologies and trends.
The significant influence of artificial intelligence on SEO in the past two years.
The growing recognition of SEO’s importance, juxtaposed with a widespread underestimation of the expertise and ongoing effort required for effective implementation and maintenance.

Among these facets, “Crawling, Analyzing, and Indexing” epitomize the areas of SEO that are particularly subject to change.

Table of Contents

The Role of Search Engines: an anology

Drawing an analogy between search engines and libraries offers a simplified understanding of SEO’s objectives.

Search Engine = The Library
Publishers = Website owners
Books = Websites
Chapters = Webpages
Readers = Search Engine Users

Achieving this involves three crucial steps

Crawling: Ensuring search engines can retrieve our web pages, akin to a library acquiring our books.
Analyzing: Allowing search engines to comprehend our web pages’ themes and content.
Indexing: Ensuring search engines catalog our web pages, making them available to users.

Websites that excel in these three areas are deemed “Search Engine Friendly” (SEF) or “SEO Friendly.” Despite the slight terminology differences, the underlying goal is identical:

To enhance the website’s visibility and searchability.

Common Challenges

Many websites face challenges in becoming SEF due to design choices that hinder search engines’ ability to crawl, analyze, and index their content.

A common mistake is prioritizing aesthetics over practicality, such as converting text into images on product pages (putting large and stylized texts on the product images), at the expense of searchable content.

This practice renders the content ‘incomprehensible’ to search engines, subsequently reducing its discoverability by users.

How to address the challenges

To combat these issues, it’s advisable for website owners to familiarize themselves with tools like Google’s “Google Search Console (GSC).”

This free tool aids in optimizing websites for SEO by providing insights into how web pages are indexed and highlighting any indexing problems that need addressing. Effectively utilizing GSC can significantly improve a website’s SEO performance.

The Importance of Technical SEO

Despite advancements in search engine technology and increased awareness of SEO best practices:

The belief that technical SEO is becoming less relevant is misguided.
The fundimental and best practices of SEO only needs to be implemented once and no need for continuous improvement is misinterpreted.
The SEO is only about website optimization, neglecting the relevance with rich results, ads, and tracking, etc., is misunderstood.

Technical challenges persist, and leveraging features like “Indexing” in GSC reveals that nearly all websites encounter some indexing issues.

Moreover, technical SEO encompasses more than just crawling, analyzing, and indexing; it includes critical areas like “User Experience”, “Structured Data (Schema Markup)”, and “Semantic HTML Elements”.

Conclusion

To summarize, the technical aspects of SEO remain indispensable. They require due attention and expertise to ensure that a website not only reaches its audience but also delivers an engaging and effective user experience.

Based on the above explanations, it should be clear that the technical aspect of SEO always has a certain importance and should not be underestimated or ignored.