SEO For Beginners: Crawling, Indexing and Ranking

In the second part of our video series, “SEO For Beginners”, we talk about how search engines like Google crawl, index, and rank websites.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:28 How Search Engines Work
1:01 Crawling
2:58 Indexing
4:22 Ranking
5:52 Important Ranking Factors

This can help you optimize your website according to Google’s best practices and improve your visibility in search results.

Crawling

Crawling refers to the discovery of all the pages on the web. Google has little programs called GoogleBots which are also known as crawlers or spiders. Crawlers start off by discovering only a few web pages and then follow the links on those webpages to find new pages, and so on and so forth. This way they discover billions of webpages on the internet to add them to Google’s database.

A Crawl Stats report in the Google Search Console shows how many pages of a website have been crawled in the last 90 days. The Coverage report shows if crawlers are encountering any errors while crawling a website.

Indexing

While crawling is the discovery of pages, indexing handles the storing of the discovered pages in Google’s database or index.

• A NoIndex tag which can be used to tell Google which pages to crawl but not index.
• A NoArchive tag to remove pages with outdated pricing. This is useful for ecommerce sites.
• An X-Robots-Tag to exclude specific folders or file types from being indexed.

Ranking

Ranking refers to showing webpages in a certain order based on a search query. Google uses hundreds of mini-algorithms, or ranking factors, to assess where and when to show pages in its search results.

These mini-algorithms add up to form Google’s ranking algorithm which keeps updating to improve Google’s ability to show the most relevant and high on quality search results.

Depending on the search intent, the searcher’s location, their search history, and other metrics, Google displays what it thinks are the most relevant results. Google’s ranking factors help the search engine in this process. There are over 200 ranking factors, but the most important ones include:

• Content Relevance

Relevance is among the most important ranking factors. Your content including your keywords needs to be relevant to the searcher’s query. Conducting keyword research will help you find the right keywords to target.

• Content Quality

The quality of the content helps you stand out from your competition. Assessing the content in terms of its EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) helps you with this factor.

• Quality Backlinks

Backlinks act like “votes” from one site to another. Having backlinks from high authority websites improves this ranking for this factor.

• Mobile-Friendly Websites

• Technical On-Page SEO

This includes having the right meta tags and headings, making sure your page can be crawled and indexed if you want it to rank, making it easier for search crawlers to understand your page, having a fast load time, using alt text for images, internal linking, having a secure site, deploying schema markup, and more.

Now that you have a solid grasp of how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks websites, it’s time to move on to developing a winning SEO strategy. And it all starts with a solid keyword research plan, which is the main topic of part 3 of this series. Stay tuned!

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[abdelhakid]

I don't knw Why people don't click the Like button for such valuable information ! Thank u for the information

[jiny]

Great!!!! Showing the examples of the stuff on the right side of the screen

[joelcapizzi]

Good Lord, Sir. I'm a machinist by trade. My wife asked me to built a Shopify store boutique. Not only did I have to build the site which I have zero experience doing, little did I know now that that's done my task is just beginning. SEO might as well be the Greek language to me. Well, that is until I came across your videos. You make terms like crawling, indexing, bots etc make sense. Your ability to teach SEO so even a machinist can understand it is a talent I rarely see and now? I may actually be able to do this. How can I thank you enough???

[jack_of_all_marketing]

Wonderful content! Everyone loves well-made, easy-to-follow, high-quality informational videos. That's what you have here. Kudos.

[MundiaKamau]

Thanks for this very helpful tutorial. Best Regards, Michael M. Kamau, Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa, 20th December 2023.

[jeroenvandenbogaerde]

Wow ... this is the type of video's i love! Straight to the point without any bs :) Thanks for this!

[AnilPanda-kf]

This is really a good video, technology explained in simple english, that everyone can understand. Thanks a lot for putting out this amazing content.

[GamingNewsSummary]

Very clear and consise thanks for a lot!

[raminala]

fantastically explained with
clarity sir.

[Dalarnanu]

Nice video! Thanx for easy explaining :)

[ivospironello]

Thank you George Constanza from seinfeld

[amnnau]

This was very helpful i learned a lot more from you than the other guy, keep it up 👍🏽

[pikopiko]

super clear and straightforward for a begineer like me!

[JosephNanyaro-uy]

this was a very great and educatuve video

[Zenowantssleep]

Thank you for this it's my exam 😊😊😊

[rewajoshi_]

this vdo was so much helpful for me ....thanks a lot sir

[muhammadsarmadwattoo]

sir i have a question that why a website owner don't allow robot.txt to crawl his file?

[osmanburlington]

Is there any scenario when Google itself attaches the noindex tag to a webpage?

[winterlord]

Have a How long it takes for bot to do crawling and indexing ?