You may have heard the term indexing related to the process of searching for a word on Google. This term is side by side with two other terms, namely crawling and ranking, which are the stages of a search engine’s work.
Indexing or indexing refers to the process of analyzing website content carried out by search engines before the content is displayed on search pages. In practice, when a website is not indexed properly, it is difficult for the website to appear on search engine pages.
Therefore, this article will discuss how to optimize the indexing process on the Google search engine, including a full explanation of what it means and how it works.
Contents
1 What Is Indexing?
2 How Indexing Works
3 Ways to Optimize Google’s Indexing Process
3.1 1. Make the Page Title Short and Meaningful
3.2 2. Use Text
3.3 3. Use Canonical URL
3.4 4. Use NoIndex
3.5 5. Use Structured Data
3.6 6. Learn SEO for Your Page
4 Conclusion
What Is Indexing?
Indexing is one part or stage of the work of a search engine. Where the search engine work series consists of three stages, namely crawling, indexing, and ranking.
In the crawling stage, search engines crawl various sites on the internet through the links or URLs they find. Search engines then store and organize the content on these various sites as part of the indexing process. Only then occurs the ranking process, where search engines display content that best suits user needs on search results pages.
An analogy you can possibly imagine for this process is when you search for a book in a library database. Where in the database there is of course the title of the book, the name of the author, and the year of publication of a book. You can find the book you are looking for in the database because the librarian has indexed the books in the library.
So, this indexing process is very important, both for a website to load on search results pages and for users who need relevant results. Because, without an indexing process, search engines will search without direction.
How Indexing Works
Broadly speaking, the indexing process is done entirely by search engines. Starting with the content analysis process, search engines will then analyze the keywords on a website and make sure those keywords are relevant to the content.
Furthermore, web crawlers and web spiders will visit various pages on a website and collect information on them. The findings from the web crawler then become an index.
Keep in mind, that indexing is different from ranking. Indexing is permanent and static, so the content of the search engine index will not change. While rankings are dynamic and always changing, so the order of search results may change when you search for the same keyword at different times.
How to Optimize the Indexing Process on Google
Although Google works without our intervention as website owners, there are several things we can do to help with the indexing process. The following guidelines are provided by Google to optimize the indexing process.
1. Make the Page Title Short and Meaningful
Make a short page title on the content you create. The longer the title, the harder it is for Google to understand it. Also, make a title that matches the meaning you want to convey through the content.
2. Use Text
Use text to convey important content. Not by using pictures. This is because Google can understand text better than images and videos.
If you really want to display an image or video, then annotate the image or video to make it easier to understand.
3. Use Canonical URL or Canonical Tag
Prior to indexing, Google checks the page whether it is a duplicate or canonical of another page. If it is considered a duplicate, then the page will be crawled less frequently by Google.
By using canonical URLs, search engines will find it easier to find the main URL of the keywords you specify. In the end, it will speed up the overall process.
The problem with URLs
You might be wondering “why would someone copy a page?” And wrongly assuming that canonicalization isn’t something you need to worry about. The problem is that we as humans tend to think of a page as a concept, like your home page. However, for search engines, each unique URL is a separate page.
For example, search crawlers can access your home page in any of the following ways:
http://www.example.com
https://www.example.com
http://example.com
http://example.com/index.php
http://example.com/index.php?r…
To a human, all these URLs represent the same page. However, to a search crawler, each of these URLs is a unique “page”. Even in this limited example, we can see that there are five copies of the home page running. However, in reality, this is just a small sample of the variations you can find.
Modern content management systems (CMS) and dynamic code-based websites compound the problem. Many sites automatically add tags, allow multiple paths (and URLs) for the same content, and add URL parameters for searches, types, currency options, and more. You may have thousands of duplicate URLs on your site and they don’t even realize it.
4. Use NoIndex
If you want a page not to be indexed by Google, then use the noindex command. However, do not apply the “noindex” command to pages blocked by robots.txt. Because, if you do that, the noindex command will not be visible from the page maybe it will still be indexed by Google.
5. Use Structured Data
Use structured data to make your content easier for search engines to understand. Structured data itself is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the content within it. For example on the recipe page, there are what the ingredients are, the cooking time and temperature, as well as the number of calories.
According to Yoast Experts, What is structured data?
6. Learn SEO for Your Page
Whether you are a programmer, an independent blogger, or a webmaster who manages large company pages, basic knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must-have. Because, that’s how you can optimize your pages better so that Google can index your pages more easily.
Conclusion
Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that indexing is one of the important processes in the stages of search engine work. Without indexing, it is impossible to get search results pages that are relevant to keywords.
As mentioned earlier, there are several ways you can help Google index your pages. Where one way is to learn SEO for your page as a good basic knowledge to have in the midst of the development of the digital technology era.