There are several ways to try and quantify the quality of a website, Orange County. You might have a site that is functional, for instance, but you’re not getting all of the pages on it indexed. If that’s what’s happening with your site, or if you suspect that’s what’s happening, then you need to bring in an SEO expert without delay.

The difference between a great website and one that is merely functional often comes down to how successfully the bots can crawl it. If there are any reasons that the Google bots can’t do their job as it relates to your site, then it’s as though your pages that you worked so hard on don’t even exist. Here’s what an SEO expert should be looking for on your site to keep those bots satisfied.

How To Make Sure Your Pages Are Crawler Accessible

The Google bots should be coming by to have a look at the website of your Orange County business soon after your site has gone live. They’ll be looking to see if the URL is located in the site’s XML Sitemaps file. They’ll also be looking at the key page elements to make sure that they are character-length limited. The title needs to be less than 75 characters. The URL should be less than 90, and the meta description should not be over 160.

You also need to be positive that you’re using the right host server, Orange County. Consult with your SEO expert if you are unsure about this at all. Your host server should not restrict any search crawler IPs. Also, your Robots.txt file should not be blocking crawler access. Your meta robots tag should allow indexing and crawling.

When necessary, your pages should be included in an RSS feed. The RSS URL should always be canonicalized and redirect to the original. If for some reason your pages are temporarily unavailable, there should be a 503 code returned by the server. If you have a redirect set up from an older or different version of your pages, it should happen directly. There should be no redirect chain.  

If you’re not an SEO expert, some of this might sound a little dizzying. Someone who is truly well-versed in website optimization should have no problem accomplishing each of these tasks, however. If you are speaking to some different SEO agencies, get a concrete idea as to what each of them plans on doing with your site. If they don’t know how to optimize every aspect of it so that it can be crawled and indexed by Google, use someone more knowledgeable.