What is Indexability?
Indexability is SEO jargon. Quite simply it means how easy it is for people to find things on your website. In practice however it is usually applied to search engine spiders - the robots which search the internet finding new websites and then indexing them within the search engine’s web (network). People use search engines such as Google to find information - therefore it is vital for a site to appear well on Google that it is easy to find information on your website.
More importantly however this goes back to the reason I created this blog - SEO has evolved so far that what is important now is not cheating the system but giving your users the best experience. So I will explain this from a user’s point of view.
My blog deals with several categories, currently they are:
- On Page SEO
- Off Page SEO
- Pay Per Click
- Social Media
Somebody looking for advice on social media may want to find topics on Facebook and Twitter, but it is unlikely that they would want to find information on pay per click marketing. Likewise somebody looking for specifically on page SEO tricks wouldn’t want topics to do with social media muddying their results. This is why it is important from an end user perspective to have a well indexed site.
The Site Map
Indexing Deep Content
Don’t forget about the content that is deep within the sitemap. as stated earlier you should try and avoid having content to many layers or clicks in from the homepage.
Google is less likely to list your deep content. Google doesn’t like deep content or long URLs so deep content is best avoided but if you really can’t find any way of avoiding having it then generate lots of links too this content. Otherwise nobody will ever read or benefit from it however I will stress again, it is best avoided.
From a search engine’s perspective everything should be organised so it is easier for real people to find the content on the site. For a small website with a blog your URL’s should look something like this:
But if you have a larger website you might consider doing something more like:
The important bit is categorising your website so that as you get deeper the keywords you are targeting become more uniform. So in the above example my home page may be targeted for six different main keywords one of which is SEO, the sub category could be on page SEO and then the article could be how indexability benefits SEO.
Indexability relates to on page SEO, which relates to what my website does. On the same layer of the site as this article I could have for example a guide about on page SEO best practice.
However this is a small blog which has been in existance for around a week now so instead I went for the much more direct URL you see at the top of the screen.
To this end remember don’t create content for no reason and don’t add layers to your website just as a way of keyword stuffing your content. This is cheating and search engine algorithms now see straight through this. Your end user doesn’t want to trawl through pages and pages of categories with no content and neither do search engines. URLs are a great place to put keywords and keeping your site well categorised is vital for good on page SEO. Just remember.
- Design each layer of your webpage with keywords in mind
- Avoid very deep content but network and link as much as you can to your deepest content
- Create a site map for search engine crawlers
- Use your site map to see if your site has the most logical structure - is everything in the right place?
- Keep it simple
Follow the advice given in this article and you will have a well laid out site making it easier for users to find what they need and also for search engines to index your content.