There are literally thousands upon thousands of blogs on the internet. There are blogs about every niche imaginable.  As such, there is a great deal of competition out there.  Bloggers all have a variety of techniques they use to obtain traffic.  However, most people agree that nothing beats organic, natural, search engine traffic.

Blogs and web pages are picked up regularly by Google and ranked in order of relevance.  Google crawls some blogs more quickly than others, depending on relevance, backlinks, etc.  The pages that are indexed quickly referred to as “authority” pages.  If you want your blog to be indexed quickly, you need to increase its relevancy and value.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your blog so that Google will crawl it more often:

• If you can, update your blog every single day with unique content. Web pages with duplicate content are indexed very slowly, if at all.  The content should be informative, have some targeted keywords (a keyword ratio of under 2%), and consist of no “fluff” or “padding”.

• Optimize even the images on your blog. Don’t just label them as “pic1.jpg” or “pic2.gif”, describe what they are.  You could also name each image as an important keyword.  Use the WordPress plugin, SEO Friendly Images

• Make sure your posts are internally interlinked professionally (i.e. link from one blog post to another), and that your blog is easy to navigate through.  The more posts your blog has, the better.  However, don’t compromise on the quality.  It’s better to have ten informative, well-written, and unique posts than twenty bad ones.

• Turn on the trackback and pingback options for every single post. Many people don’t realize the importance of this, especially in regards to a Google crawler.  With these options on, you will be directing a Googlebot to crawl and find your new posts. Use the MaxBlog Ping Optimizer plugin.
  You can see exactly how to set up the plugin here: Increase blog traffic

• Try getting as many quality backlinks from relevant sites as possible. One way you can do this is publish some good articles in article directories and add your link to the “resource box”.  Some directories will let you add two links, and some even three.  These sites get ranked very high by Google, so your articles (with the links) will be indexed rather quickly.

• Keep your URLs simple, yet effective. Long, complicated URLs take longer to find and index.  You need to make them easy to remember and to the point.  And, as mentioned above, all of the URLs within your blog need to be organized, easy to find, and directly linked to the relevant content.  All of your old posts need to be linked to all of your new posts. Use the Clean Slugs plugin. You do have to join Yoast’s newsletter to get this plugin but it’s well worth it.

• There is some dispute as to whether black hat SEO methods are worthwhile. While using such methods probably will get your blog indexed quickly, they’re extremely risky and your blog can end up being banned.  It’s therefore safer to use white hat methods, as they will ensure that your blog will be indexed more quickly over time.

In summary, you can get Google to crawl your blog more quickly by making it as search engine friendly as possible.  This means all of your URLs need to be organized, your content needs to be unique, the keywords need to fit in naturally and not overstuffed, etc.  Google loves authority websites, so try to make yours as relevant as possible.

What tips do you have to make Google crawl your blog more often? Share them in the comments below.

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