Optimize The Crawl Budget of your website

We already know that search engines make use of some crawler bots known as ‘spiders,’ e.g., Googlebot to crawl website pages, garner information required to be added to their index.

The real question here is ‘What is a crawl budget?’

A website’s crawl budget is the number of times a search engine’s crawler bot or spider crawls that website in search of information within a stipulated time.

Googlebot is more likely to crawl your website if: it is popular, and if it isn’t stale, i.e., if the contents are updated often.

Knowing these things, it is thus important to make the most of your crawl budget and optimize it by making sure of the following items.

• Make your essential pages visible and crawlable while blocking pages that of no value.
• Prevent long redirect chains.
• Work on your internal linking.
• Structure your website well.
• Make sure your sitemap is up to date.

Why Is It Important?

Optimization of crawl budget is important because it helps Google know which pages on your website are the most important when they (Google’s bots) intend to index your site.

When crawlers crawl your website, they gather information which would help them index your website to their site, and we all know what that means in the long run – higher SEO ranking, and the higher your chances of getting a feature on the coveted first page of Google or any other search engine.

Top 5 SEO Tools to optimize the Crawl Budget of your site

• ContentKing App (Paid): ContentKing functions just like other tools for auditing search engine optimization, but it can crawl your site and alert you about future issues.
• DeepCrawl (Paid): Deep Crawl Is worth having as it can scan web pages and provide premium reports which inform you about the number of H1 tags for every part of your page and can even inform you about the length of your descriptions for your Twitter cards.
• Forecheck (Paid): another website crawler that reviews the problems hindering you from making it to Google's first page. Reports come color-coded to inform you about most pressing issues.
• OnCrawl (Paid): OnCrawl happens to be another top audit tool for websites which provide you with HTML-related issues alerts. You can also get information about duplicated content, the performance of a website, etc.
• Botify (Paid): highly effective SEO crawler which you can configure to carry out auto daily crawls to discover any issues and comes with a fantastic support team with a user-friendly interface.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to help you to boost your Crawl Budget

• Scraper – Content Crawler Plugin for WordPress (Paid): superb plugin with a fantastic user interface for scraping needed websites and using the template.
• WP Content Crawler (Paid): great plugin with a fantastic user interface for scraping needed websites for just $25.
• Crawlomatic (Paid): another good plugin with a fantastic user interface for scraping needed websites and comes with automatic posting as well as login cookie. JavaScript is used to carry out crawling.
• WordPress Automatic Plugin (Paid): currently boasting lots of downloads with very high reviews. Constant updates since 2012 auto-posting to WordPress.
• WP Scraper (Free): this plugin will help you move link contents to WordPress websites, and it's free.

Did you know? Website owners can find out their crawl budget using Google Search Console. This can give a good idea of what contents are having a good rate by Google and on the other hand which are being ignored.

Expert’s suggestion: “Prioritizing what to crawl, when, and how many resources the server hosting the site can allocate to crawling is more important for bigger sites or those that auto-generate pages based on URL parameters.” – Gary Illyes, Google (https://searchengineland.com/google-explains-crawl-budget-means-webmasters-267597)