SEO indexing refers to the process by which your content comes to appear in the search results of portals such as Google, Naver, and Bing.
Looked at a little more concretely, this process involves a search engine crawling (discovering) a web page, analyzing the page’s content, and storing it in a database.
An indexed page can appear in search results, and the goal of SEO is to optimize your pages so they earn a good ranking in those results.
The SEO Indexing Process
Specifically, SEO indexing involves the following stages:
- Crawling: A search engine’s crawler (or spider) explores the internet and discovers web pages.
- Analysis: The crawler analyzes the page’s content to identify the important information (text, images, links, and so on).
- Indexing: The analyzed information is stored in the search engine’s database, and that database is called the “index.”
- Ranking: When a user searches for a particular keyword, the search engine draws on the information in its index to decide which pages are most relevant and highest in quality, and shows them as results.
Managing SEO indexing well improves your website’s visibility and can drive more traffic. To that end, a website should be structured so that search engines can crawl and index it easily, and you should apply a range of SEO strategies such as keyword optimization, high-quality content, and faster site speed.
My Website Won’t Get Indexed!
Many clients come to us saying their website simply won’t get indexed.
Below is a checklist to run through when your website isn’t being indexed.
- robots.txt file: This file tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they should or shouldn’t crawl. If your robots.txt is too restrictive or misconfigured, important pages may not get indexed.
- Meta tags: The meta tags in the
<head>section of each web page can instruct crawlers to index or not index the page. If anoindextag is set, that page will not be indexed. - Sitemap: A sitemap tells search engines about your website’s structure. If you have no sitemap, or it isn’t up to date, new or updated pages can be missed.
- Server errors: Server errors (for example, a 500 Internal Server Error) can prevent crawlers from reaching a page, and such errors affect indexing.
- Page load speed: If a page loads slowly, crawlers may not index it properly. Slow loading also hurts the user experience.
- Mobile friendliness: Search engines favor mobile-friendly sites. A site that isn’t optimized for mobile users can suffer in both indexing and ranking.
- Security: Sites that don’t use HTTPS may be trusted less by search engines, which can affect indexing.
- Content quality: Low-quality or duplicate content can hurt indexing, so providing high-quality, original content matters.
SEO Indexing Can Take Time
Most SEO indexing doesn’t happen instantly; it takes place with some delay. In particular, unless your website has already built up a degree of trust and is visited often by crawler bots, the road to getting indexed is likely to be a long one.
In other words — though it varies from site to site — for a newly built website you should expect to wait somewhere around one to three weeks. And even once a page is indexed, it will likely rank low at first. Assuming your SEO optimization is in place, that ranking should improve gradually over time.
