In order for Google to even begin seeing your website, it needs to be able to send it’s Google bots to “crawl” your website. The way that these bots crawl your website is determined by a file called robots.txt.
On most websites, there are pages that utilize CSS and/or Javascript, which are often external files that are linked to from your HMTL. In order for Google to access these, and fully understand your webpages, these files need to remain unblocked by the robots.txt file.
Google Webmaster Tools
One of the best ways to understand what Google is pulling from your website is to visit your Webmaster Tools, which is free to set up and fairly easy to use. Here you can find the keywords that Google associates with your website. If you don’t see the keywords you were anticipating, something may be wrong with the way that Google is reading your site.
There’s also a tool in Webmaster tools called Fetch as Google. This allows you to see a URL like Google sees it. The information you can gain from using this tool can help you modify a page for better optimization or isolate a coding issue that could be causing search issues.
Crawling Through Links
The way that Google navigates your website is through links, and the way it views it is through code and text. This means that your beautiful website with plenty of high quality photos, while attractive and great for customer retention, is not so great for Google, unless you properly tag your pages and photos. Leave Google plenty of breadcrumbs to filter through your site. You can read more about the benefits of having a good internal linking structure here. Using the proper meta information and alt tags for your photos is essential for Google to read your website and rank it well.
Feeling a little lost still? Contact Sales & Marketing Technologies today for a free consultation about your website and Digital marketing strategy. Our experienced and skilled Orlando Digital marketing team can help you to decode how Google indexes and ranks your website, as well as what you can do to improve it!