Credit: Walter Wycliffe
With crawl rate being an uber factor in deciding how fast webpages are indexed in the SERPs, SEO's are always striving for ways to invite the Googlebot over to client websites more frequently. Of course, generating new and quality content is probably the best way to inject some fresh visits from the googlebot, but then again, generating new content is quite the task in itself. But are there other legitimate ways to having a website crawled more frequently than simply generating new content? I'm going to show you atleast 5 ways to easily get the Googlebot coming for more!
- Think Dynamic - Dynamic content is probably the best 'passive' way to attract bots to frequently visit a website or webpage. For example, using plugins that dynamically change the content on your WordPress blog would be one such example. Any plugins built to show randomized posts, frequently changing popular posts, recent comments, and other such frequently changing elements would fall into this category.
- Go Social - Do you have a social media website related to your website's niche that you visit on a regular basis? Why not add a widget if they offer it to your website? The less javascript in the widget the better, as the bots will see on page content rendered in html better than JS calls.
- Add Some Pictures - Do you have a corporate photo album on Flickr? Why not add a small photo stream to your website to keep things down to earth. Aside from crawling benefits, it'll show your prospective customers that your business values its employees, and that you can have some fun!
- Ping Everywhere you Can - Holler at 'em when you're ready to push the publish button on that post. Letting most major pinging services know that you have a new entry is often enough to tip the bots over to your site. I prefer using WordPress's built-in pinging service with close to a 100 pinging urls. Leave a comment and I'll pass you my huge list of pinging urls.
- Random Quote of the Day - Whats better than tying well known quotes to your business's core values? A simple RSS importer can be used to populate random quotes of the day based on a certain keyword. Have an advertising agency website? Get quotes from the great Leo Burnett or Ogilvy. It'll not only make you look sophisticated to your audience, but to the googlebot too!
Do you have more out-of-the-box ideas to make the googlebot a frequent visitor? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.