Improving your Google Crawl Rate

I've been very busy lately with applying some SEO-optimalizations to a site that has been around for some years now. (Namely: http://shop.vlan.be)
Therefore I decided to do an article on how you can improve your ranking with search engines like Google.

I will be posting multiple articles on this subject, but for the first subject I would like to talk about the "Google Crawl Rate".

The Google Crawl Rate is a reasonable indication of how important your site is to Google. If the Google Crawler visits your site regularly, then this is a good sign of your site's importance. You can't force Googlebot to visit your site more often, but you can take steps to invite it to come over.

I'll be discussing five tips to get Google's attention:

1. Make sure your content is updated regularly. Try to add as much unique content to your site as possible.
What kind of unique content you should add depends on the type of site you have. If you have a blog of some sort, you should add new messages regularly. A lot of sources say you should try to have three new messages per week. I don't know if that's the optimal amount of messages you should post, but if you can post that many useful messages per week, then I do advise you to do it! The more new content you offer to Google, the more often Google will come back to check for new content, thus making sure new content is crawled as quickly as possible.

2. Avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when the same page can be accessed through two different URLs. Google feels like it's being misleaded by you because by indexing the content of one page with two different URLs, you'll effectively increase your chances of appearing in the Google search results. This is why Google will allocate a penalty-point to your website. You can't find out how many penalties your site is awarded but the number of penalties your site has received have a direct impact in the position of your site in the search results. If enough penalties are allocated to your site, then your site might stop appearing in the search results altogether. That's why it's very important to avoid duplicate content!

3. Make other sites backlink to you. According to some specialists, this is the most important advice to follow because the number of backlinks your site has determines how important your site is to Google. While this is certainly a big part of your score according to Google, it is not the only thing that is considered. Nevertheless, you should definitely increase the number of backlinks to your site however you can.
If Google determines your site is pretty important, then it will crawl your site more often and if there is enough unique content on your site, your site will appear more in the search results which in turn benefits the traffic directed to your website.

4. Create a sitemap. I've recently followed this advice for the first time and I was pleasantly surprised by the result. A sitemap is an XML-file that contains all of your site's unique URLs. Google doesn't promise it will crawl all those URLs, but it will use the sitemap to try and figure out your website's structure.
Nevertheless, offering a sitemap containing all URLS on your website can help Google in discovering and crawling those pages.
By keeping your sitemap up to date, you can present new content to Google on a silver platter.
A sitemap needs to be presented to Google via the Webmastertools (which will be discussed in a future post)

5. Create a blog. If you're trying to promote a blog through Google, this advice is useless, but if you're trying to promote a different type of site through Google, then this advice is definitely worth following.
You see, popular blogs and popular blog sites (like Blogger.com or Wordpress.com) are constantly being crawled by Google because they are teeming with new content all the time. Having your own blog among those, containing links to content on your site alongside the articles will definitely increase the importance of your site and will increase your crawl rate significantly.
Make sure you don't only post a link to the content, but describe the content as well or write an article about it. The content will lure more visitors to your blog, who might click the link to your site and become new regular visitors.

That's about all of the tips I have for this article. Does anyone have a tip I forgot to mention? Feel free to send it to me, or leave a reply to this article!