How can you force bots to crawl your site

There is no denying the fact that ‘content is the king’ and prime key to the site’s optimization. But only a great content can’t do the magic unless it is easily crawled by the ‘bots’. There is no use of developing a fresh and breezy content if it is not hundred percent crawl-able from the search engines index. 

There are some tricks to make the bots crawl your site successfully. 

• First point is that make sure that your site includes inter linking mechanism for easy navigation from one page to another.  According to Google Webmaster Guidelines, no page should contain more than 100 links, otherwise it will referred to as ‘Link Farm’.

• The webmasters must include a sitemap to list the pages as well as total links used throughout the site. Google sitemap is a great tool to make the search engine well informed about the pages, number of links included and also how often the site content is updated.  This information is particularly important when the site pages are not interlinked within.

• How easily and effectively bots will crawl through your site depends on the way the internal pages are linked up. Bots find it difficult to index Flash and JavaScript menus. If you find it impossible to remove this ‘unfavorable’ navigation, then at least make it a point to integrate text-link navigation into the footer. This way, it will be easier for the bots to index your site.

• Google webmaster guidelines suggests on creating a short and static HTML link. According to the guidelines, the dynamic URL especially those with tagged session identifiers should be avoided because these are ignored by the bots. ‘&counts=’ should be used instead of ‘&id=’ to transfer the variables between the site pages. It is because Google does not count ‘&counts’ into the indexes.