The whole SEO process can be divided among three major parts i.e. Crawlabilty, Content and Links. These three things are pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your site’s success path.
First keep this thing in your mind that Search Engine Spiders are not all that smart. If a spider can’t find content (suppose there is a broken link, for example), it’s programmed to end what it’s doing and wouldn’t go look around for that great article you wrote. It’s going to move on to the subsequent link and keep crawling, crawling, and crawling. That’s what it does.
So, it’s obvious that if a spider can’t access your content then your content will not get indexed and so will never be found on search engines. That’s why crawlability is the basic and most important component of SEO and we will highlight these crawlabilty issues.
1) Screwing up Robots.txt file.
Make sure your text is like the one written as User-agent:* Disallow: It should not be like the one written as: User-agent:* Disallow: /
This mistake can drop your organic rankings drastically.
2) Too many variables or parameters in your URLs
Although Search Engines are getting better and better in means of crawling long and ugly looking links but still they don’t like them. Short URL’s also do get clicked more often in the result pages and they are good for crawlabilty and clickabilty.
3) Session ID’s in your URL’s
Search Engines straight away do not like session ID’s in URL’s. If you are using Session ID’s then just store them in cookies rather than including them in your URL’s. Session ID’s can cause a single page content to be visible at multiple URL’s and thus obstructing the SERP’s.
4) Your site suffers from code bloat
Even though Spiders are normally good at sorting out code from content, but that doesn’t mean you should make it more complex by having so much code that the content is tough to find.
5) Your navigation and internal linking
Designers and developers can be pretty creative while designing a web site but this creativity may come in the way Search Engine Crawlers. Your site’s navigation build in complicated DHTML, java script code, flash or Ajax based can stop a crawler in its track.
Though crawlers have become advanced that they can crawl these entire things but why take a chance.Crawlability is often ignored in the name of creativity and coding, but it’s as vital to your SEO efforts as content development, link building, and any other element of the SEO Strategy.
