There have been a number of different definitions floating around for the term “crawl budget”, but there is not one single term that can describe everything that a crawl budget stands for on the outside. Here, we will try to clarify what it means, and how it relates to Googlebot.

When you encounter crawl errors, your website can be hindered from appearing in a search results page, even when your target audience has performed the ideal search query. The crawl error report comes about and gives details of the website's URLs that Google is not able to successfully crawl, or those that returned with an HTTP error code. There are two main sections to the error report, site errors and URL errors.

What is a password protected website? Why would a website be password protected? Why would I want to crawl a password protected website? These are common questions that everyone asks themselves at some point, especially if you work in website design, development, or SEO. Let’s take each question one at a time, before looking at a few others as well.

Sitemaps are a necessity for SEO

A sitemap is defined as a simple directory or guide that holds information along with other details on web pages that are contained on a website, in addition to the content on these pages. Search engines will do their job in crawling a sitemap to find and identify all information that is applicable to a specific search query that has been performed. The pages within the directory are listed in a logical hierarchical order, where the most relevant pages will be listed at the top, and the least relevant pages will be placed closer to the bottom.

You know you need a content audit when you realize that your organic search traffic has been going flat in the recent past or the ranking of your keywords in vital search terms has been falling.  A content audit is an assessment that examines the web content assets of your company for SEO value, relevance, messaging and quality.  Taking a comprehensive approach towards examining the nature of your website’s content goes a long way in enhancing your website for significantly better results. An audit can be time-consuming and boring especially because you are not spending your time on content creation and promotion. However, when done appropriately, it can be very effective in revolutionizing your online presence.

You have probably heard that you shouldn’t have duplicate content, but have you ever wondered why? Chances are you have heard that it is bad for SEO, but you haven’t really been given a thorough explanation as to why. It is hard to adjust your content to meet certain needs if you don’t even understand what duplicate content is, let alone how it is negatively affecting your SEO. By understanding the effects duplicate content can have on your SEO, you can make necessary adjustments to improve your material.

A content audit is imperative to the success of your website, especially when you realize that your organic search traffic has been going flat or that the ranking of your keywords in vital search terms haven’t been cutting it. In essence, a content audit is an assessment that examines the web content assets of your company for SEO value, relevance, messaging and quality. Not only that, by using a content audit tool and sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper users will be able to make sure their meta descriptions and their lengths are on point, thanks to the tool’s highlight feature.

Taking a comprehensive approach towards examining the nature of your website’s content goes a long way in enhancing your website for significantly better results. An audit can be time-consuming and boring, especially because you are not spending your time on content creation and promotion. However, when completed appropriately, it can be very effective in revolutionizing your online presence.

Google’s adoption and official launch of sitemaps way back in 2005 is all web developers and software engineers needed to come up with simplified ways of creating, submitting and managing sitemaps. As a result, the web is currently filled with quite a few sitemap generators and things are not likely to slow down. You can now install plugins on your Wordpress blog that will handle everything related to sitemaps. It is actually a necessity for all website owners that cannot be ignored. A simple Google search will bring forth hundreds of results and as always, everyone claims to be the best unless you are suffering from some esteem issues.

There are many ways to conduct research when you are looking for information including data collection, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and more. Depending on your purpose, focus groups might be an adequate way for you to obtain information from consumers about your product or service and how you can make it better. Just like for all study approaches, it is important you understand what focus groups are and how they can be helpful, as well as the pros and cons of using this kind of research.

While each method serves a different purpose, focus groups can be a way to get information quickly from a larger sampling of consumers, whereas if you are thinking about conducting an interview, you would spend more time with one person and not get as much information. It would be more time consuming to conduct individual interviews with multiple people. In addition, a focus group is a way to obtain qualitative information instead of using a survey that gives you quantitative data.

Quantitative data can be very helpful in some situations, but getting qualitative data can be more beneficial when you would like to understand the behavior and opinions of consumers. Below is more information that can help you to understand if a focus group is the right kind of research for you.

Sitemaps are the best and easiest way for webmasters to inform major search engines about pages on their website that are open for crawling and indexing. Broken down simply, a sitemap is an XML file that is a list of URLs contained on each site, along with added metadata about each of the URLs so that the search engines can more accurately crawl these sites. This metadata can be anything from how often it changes, when it was last updated, its priority in relation to other pages on the site, and much more.

It is official. Your site is live and ready to go. You are ready for countless users to flock to your site just to see what you will say, but this is not Black Friday. They are not sitting there glued to their computers waiting for your site to be ready. You need to draw users in, so how do you go about doing that? The answer lies in SEO, and to be successful online, it is important you understand SEO and know how to use it to make your site succeed.

The number of websites in the world has surpassed 1 billion. This translates to 1 website for every seven people. This has resulted in competition for rankings in SERPs because every website owner wants to be found. Your site’s visibility first depends on the content, which then has to be crawled. This is a bit tricky if you have so many pages full of information, which makes it difficult for Googlebot spider to detect what should be indexed on your site. It is for this reason that Google sitemaps were introduced, which are basically text files with lists of web addresses of all the pages contained on your website.

"Obviously everyone wants to have great sitemaps and they're definitely useful for us for crawling new and updated content." - John Mueller, Google

Google Webmaster Central's latest Hangout is just another verification from Google that sitemaps are not going anywhere and are still an important tool that aids in crawling and indexing your website. A webmaster asked about why his breadcrumb was being displayed inconsistently in search results and how to fix it. John explained that "In general that means our algorithms are trying to do something different than what you are trying to do, and those are the things that we bring back feedback to the team. Usually, they are not able to manually tweak that for individual sites. He then explains to the viewer about the fact that sitemaps have no relation to Rich Snippets.

Some webmasters have raised questions over the effectiveness of HTML sitemaps. Many people put more emphasis on XML Sitemaps and in the process they forget about the HTML sitemaps which are also effective for navigation and search engines’ crawling. These sitemaps serve a dual purpose as they are meant both for the visitors as well as the search engine robots. Just like XML sitemaps there are many sitemap generators that can be used to create HTML sitemaps. Whenever a new website goes live, one has to submit their websites to the Search engines so that they know about the online presence of the website. In return, the search engines deploy their robots or crawlers on your website which help in the indexing process. These bots crawl through link by link and report it back to the search engine.

Technical SEO Checklist

Many times webmasters will focus on on-site factors when they need to increase their organic growth but much like a vehicle, a website does require behind the scenes maintenance so that it can perform at its best. If your website is falling behind in the ranking, there are definitely some things regarding your SEO that will need to be updated or looked at. When thinking of SEO, it tends to center on on-page factors rather than the technical issues that aren't so pretty. These are all of the tiny little sort of boring things that do not seem like much but actually make a pretty significant impact. All of these technical things are what gives your website the strong foundation that it needs so that it can support all of the great content that you are publishing on it.

What is a persona? This is how a person views things, how they act, what they believe, and the like. It incorporates the most important things that make them who they are, and organizes it into a profile. This is why personas are so important for businesses—they need to know all of these things about their customers. This is when they would create a web persona. Essentially, this would be a fictional profile that represents the target audience according to averages that have been calculated regarding the customer's buying process, their personality, and their demographics. Personas and user archetypes are used by companies in guiding their decisions regarding new product launches, new features, site design, and interactions with customers. It is important that they understand the goals and patterns of the audience in order to create a successful archetype that will satisfy this targeted group. The aim is to make a persona that represents the total package of the target audience. When this happens, it allows the business to appeal to the maximum amount of their real life customers.

Performing content audits is an essential part of maintaining a website, but you cannot just jump right in and perform an audit. There are several important things that need to happen prior to starting the audit. Because some websites actually have thousands upon thousands of pages with their own text, images, applications, and documents, it is almost impossible to manually audit any website's content. Before even thinking of that, you will need to perform a content inventory. This will organize all of the information on the website into a format that will be easier to read and manipulate.

The key to maintaining website content successfully is the duty of understanding what your assets are. In short, your content is your assets. There are so many ways of understanding the technology that is behind running a website, but what you have as the inventory is the main way to realize what exactly it is that the technology delivers—the content. A quantitative content inventory is the document that will list all of the website's pages and the data about those pages. This type of content inventory is no doubt time-consuming, but it is a practice that yields much rewards to website managers, information architects, website designers, and content strategists.

When blocking a URL on your website, you are able to stop Google from indexing certain web pages with the purpose of being displayed in Google's Search Engine Results. This means that when people are looking through the search results, they will not be able to see or navigate to a URL that has been blocked, and they will not see any of its content. If there are pages of content that you would like to refrain from being seen within Google's Search Results, there are a few things you can do to complete this task.

When building a website, it is important to build it with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. By doing this from the start of your planning, it will help to ensure less work needs to be done in the future. To have to go back and rebuild a website for SEO will take a lot more time and energy than just doing it right from the start. If you are a business with an already established website looking for suggestions of how to increase SEO rankings, this article can also be beneficial for you. As SEO becomes more and more important in the world of the internet, it is becoming more vital to businesses and how successful they are. Using SEO techniques are no longer an option in today’s digital world. These strategies are a necessity to success.