One of the first steps that needs to be completed when you create a website is to make sure people know you have a website all to begin with. Considering that the majority of traffic to websites come from search engines, this is achieved by letting Google know your website exists, through crawling through it. The problem is that getting Google to crawl through your website is often a slow process. Even when you have a website up and running, it can still be slow for Google to realize when you have published new content. Here are a few ways you can make it easier for Google to crawl through your website with their robots, so your content can be displayed quicker on SERP (search engine result pages).

Create a Sitemap

A sitemap for a website is an XML document which displays links to all of your content on your website, in an organised fashion. The sitemap is stored on the website’s server, typically under ‘https://www.websitename.com/sitemap.xml’. It is a way for Google and other search engines see what pages there are on the website and when new content has been created. Without a sitemap, it is very difficult for search engines to understand and find the content on your website.

Most themes should come with sitemaps for the likes of WordPress websites. If not, there are many free plugins out there that will automatically create sitemaps for your website.

Implement Your Website Onto Google Search Console

Google Search Console (Webmasters Tool) is an effective way to see how Google interacts with your website, being how your website ranks to how it crawls your website to errors Google encounters associated to your website.

For this reason, it is a necessity to make sure you use the full potential of Google Search Console with your website. This will help Google communicate better and crawl through your website.

Use Breadcrumbs

Although it can be argued that the sitemap is the biggest factor to Google crawling through your website, there are other factors that can help speed the process and make it easily for Google to crawl through pages. One of these techniques is by adding breadcrumbs to your website. This is a navigation linking menu in the form of something such as homepage >> Category >> sub category >> post title (with each being links).

Breadcrumbs are a great way to illustrate to Google how the content on your website is structured. Not only this, it has benefits to add them above/below content for your web users. Having useful links in breadcrumbs will encourage web users to click onto the breadcrumb links, opening the possibility for the web user to click onto and read further related content.