Whether you have an e-commerce website, a blog, or a site dedicated to the funniest cat videos you have ever seen, website indexing is the way to get large amounts of traffic to your site.
Every step you take to optimise your website is to get it indexed and ranked higher on the search page results. What is website indexing? How do we use IndexNow? Are cat videos really that funny?
Let’s explore these hard-hitting questions and, ultimately, get your pages ranking higher on Google.
Why is web indexing important?
As a full-service digital marketing agency, it is our job to understand the Internet as a whole. And we have come to learn that website indexing is not just a nice-to-have but essential if you want to reach people online for any topic you can think of.
What is website indexing?
When you search for something on Google, what you are looking at is the search engine’s index. All search engines (such as Google, Bing, etc.) have bots that explore the Internet and inspect different websites. These websites are then ranked against different search terms and topics depending on certain selection criteria such as relevancy, ease of access, clarity, etc. This is called website indexing.
An effective SEO strategy will help meet those selection criteria and result in your website getting a higher index. If you want to know if the people you are working with are the best SEO company for you, ask if they know what website indexing is.
The act of sending bots to gather information from websites on the Internet is known as the ‘Pull’ method. Despite being such a vital function, it currently takes anywhere between several days to multiple weeks for bots to reach new or updated websites.
Why is this bad?
Imagine you’re preparing for a massive Black Friday sale. You update your website with new products, new information, and huge discounts the night before. You wait till it strikes midnight and hit publish!
Unless you have a large audience waiting to jump on your deals, your website won’t get picked up by the search engine’s bots for another two weeks. In the meantime, your competition has ranked higher and stolen all your customers.
Although it works, the ‘Pull’ method has needed an upgrade for a long time. This is where IndexNow comes in.
What is IndexNow?
Besides content that provides maximum value, getting indexed fast is the best way to drive more traffic to your site as it starts to rank for the correct search terms. The problem with the current index ‘pull’ method is that you don’t have any control over when the search engine bots find your content, index it, and show it to users.
This is a huge handicap, and not even the best SEO agency in the world can change that. This is where IndexNow shines.
It allows you to notify search engines when a particular URL has had its content added or updated. By doing this, you no longer have to wait for weeks and hope that search engines find your site. Instead, you can actively start that process resulting in your site indexing much faster than any other site on the Internet that doesn’t use IndexNow.
As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can help you use IndexNow the right way.
What makes it different?
Microsoft has introduced a new protocol with IndexNow. Web publishers no longer have to depend on search engine bots to find their content using the ‘Pull’ method. IndexNow implements the ‘Push’ method, a reference to website content being ‘pushed’ for bots to find faster.
Why do you need IndexNow?
The Internet is nothing like it was decades ago when the ‘Pull’ method was first created. There is an unfathomable amount of information and websites online. To think that creating and publishing a website is all you need to get online traffic is incredibly naive, to say the least.
IndexNow is the first of its kind and gives website owners the ability to wade through the noise, be ‘seen’ by search engine bots, and get indexed much faster.
How does IndexNow work?
Simply put, IndexNow pings the search engine to let it know that a URL has updated its content. Therefore, instead of waiting for the bots to organically find that URL once every few weeks, that content gets prioritised, and the bots make their way to that website in a matter of hours or days.
What’s in it for me?
Proud of being awarded the best digital marketing agency in Australia, we always ensure we do everything for our clients. Here is what you can expect when using IndexNow:
- Reduced waiting time for search engines to index your website: It can currently take up to 2 or more weeks when trying to get a website indexed. Using the ‘push’ method provided by IndexNow, web publishers such as yourself can notify search engines to look at your website and get indexed in a much smaller time frame, possibly in days.
- Improves the process of locating new content: Websites must be continually indexed, not only when a new website has been published but when an existing website has had its content changed or updated.
How do I use IndexNow?
- Website plugin – If you have a WordPress website, the easiest way to implement IndexNow is to use the plugin created by Microsoft that carries out all the necessary steps automatically.
- Manually – The steps to implement IndexNow manually can be broken into three main parts: generating an API Key, hosting the API key, and submitting the URL with the API key as its parameter. This link to Microsoft Bing allows you to generate the API key. Plus, it has further instructions on how to carry out the rest of the steps to use IndexNow the right way.
IndexNow is relatively new to the search engine industry. However, huge companies such as Bing and Yandex have embraced this new innovative technology. Even Google is running tests with the tool because they see its immense potential. Top SEO companies are always looking for the latest tools to give their clients the edge in capturing more market share. IndexNow is the edge we’ve all been looking for.
Website indexing allows search engines (and potential customers) to find the important pages of your website. IndexNow has taken this process to another level.
Want to know how to take advantage of website indexing to boost your SEO? Give us a call and receive a FREE strategy session worth $1200.
