How Does Google Find Your Website Content?

Through the use of software programs and algorithms, Google gathers web content so that those using Google to search can readily access the information that they are looking for. Because of this, there is very little effort required by webmasters to make sure that Google retrieves their content.

Off-site, or off-page, SEO refers to the techniques that are implemented to improve the ranking of a website among search engine results pages (SERPs) that do not directly affect the experience of the user in relation to the way that they experience your content. Many times, off-site SEO is associated with link building, but it is so much more than that. After you have worked on getting all of your website content into order and perfectly optimized, you will need to focus on things like building your website's credibility, increasing the important inbound links, and also building your own social media presence. Google will never reveal their specific algorithm for search ranking, but the search engine giant does give out masses of information regarding creating relevant content that will make for a good user experience.

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.

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.

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of the web pages that are on a website. It will relay to Google and other search engines the organization of the website's content. Googlebot and other search engine crawlers will read the sitemap so that they can crawl your site with more knowledge. These sitemaps can also hold important metadata regarding the pages that are listed within the sitemap. Metadata is any information about a web page—like how often it is changed, its importance in relation to the other pages on the site, when it was last updated, and more. Sitemaps can be used to give Google metadata that is associated with particular types of content on the web pages like videos, images, and mobile content. A video entry on a sitemap can indicate the video's running time, age rating, and category. An image entry on a sitemap may tell the type, subject matter, and license.