What are crawlers and what do I do to make sure that my page gets their attention?

A web crawler, or crawler for short, is a software used by most prominent search engines to read a text and code from a website to create entries for the search engine results. If the text and code are found by the crawlers to be faulty, they may rank your website lower in the search engine results. Therefore, it is very important to make sure that these two components are taken care of before you apply the following tips to make it even better:

  • Keep your URL under 100 characters and minimise the use of special characters like @, # and !.
  • Come up with a unique and catchy but short title tag and make sure to include your key word or phrase.
  • Write a 1-2 sentence long meta description, and again, make sure to include the key word or phrase.
  • Make sure that the content on your page is free from plagiarism as this will affect both the ranking and the reputation of your website negatively.
  • Include high quality media like images and videos with credits if necessary, and make sure to use a HTML tag to describe the content as crawlers cannot pick up media content.