Discover SEO indexing control and its importance for your website

by our SEO Agency Optimize 360

Indexing control

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The success of a website depends largely on its visibility in search engines such as Google.

To achieve this, it is essential to understand how the referencing natural (SEO) and in particular indexing control.

In this article, we'll give you 10 key points to bear in mind if you want to control the indexing of your site and improve its overall performance.

1. Understanding the indexing process

Indexing involves a search engine analysing the pages on your site, storing them in its database and making them available to Internet users when they carry out a search relating to your activity or theme. Indexing control allows you to choose which pages are analysed and displayed in the search results, and how they are presented.

2. The Sitemap: organising the indexing of your site

A sitemap is a file in XML format that lists all the pages on your site. This document serves as a guide for indexing robots search engines, to tell them which elements and pages of the site should be browsed and indexed.

It is important to have an up-to-date, well-structured sitemap to make the robots' task easier and speed up the indexing of your site.

2.1 Using a sitemap generation tool

A number of free and paid online tools exist for automatically generating a sitemap file from the URL of your site. They greatly simplify the creation of the document and provide a basis on which you can make any necessary changes.

3. Meta tags: providing guidance to search engines

Meta tags are elements HTML placed in the header of a web page, which provide information to search engines about the content of the page. They are not directly visible to users, but managing them is essential to a good SEO strategy.

3.1 The "title" tag

La title tag defines the page title, which will be displayed in search results. It must be short (up to 70 characters)It should be relevant and contain keywords relating to the content of the page.

3.2 Description tag

The description tag provides a summary of the page's content, which will also appear in search results under the title. It must be clear, attractive and informativewhile integrating the main keywords in a natural way.

4. The robots.txt file: controlling access by indexing robots

This text file is located at the root of your site and informs search engine spiders which pages they can and cannot index. In this way, you can block the indexing of certain parts of your site, such as pages with very similar content or that are of no interest to users.

Use of robots.txt must be judiciousThis is because the wrong settings can prevent important pages from being indexed and damage the SEO performance of your site.

5. Marking rel="canonical" avoid the problem of duplicate content

This tag is used to indicate to search engines which is the "original" version of a page, when several URLs lead to the same content. By adding this tag to pages with duplicate content, you avoid being penalised by search engines and ensure that your pages are properly indexed.

6. Tags noindex and nofollow

The noindex is used to specify to a search engine that a specific page should not be indexed. It is useful in certain special cases, for example for an internal login page.

As for the nofollowThis is used to tell search engines not to follow the links on a given page. This option can be used for blog comments in particular, to avoid problems associated with link spam.

7. Managing redirects

Redirects consist of automatically sending an Internet user from one site to another. URL to another, for example when an obsolete page is removed or its address changes. It is important to manage redirects properly so as not to lose the SEO 'juice' accumulated on the first page and prevent users from coming across a 'bad' page. 404 error.

7.1 301 (permanent) redirects

A 301 redirect indicates that a page has been permanently moved to a new address. In this way, search engines transfer the authority of the first page to the second, so that PageRank and other important metrics for visibility in search results can be maintained.

8. 404 error management (Page not found)

404 errors are detrimental to theuser experience and give your site a bad image. It is therefore crucial to regularly monitor their appearance, using the tools provided in the Search Console Google, and to correct them by implementing 301 redirects appropriate.

9. Check mobile compatibility

With smartphones becoming the predominant way of surfing the web, it's vital that your site is adapted to display on different types of screen. What's more, Google now favours mobile-friendly sites in its search results.

9.1 Using a responsive theme

Opting for a responsive site theme, i.e. one that automatically adapts to the size of the visitor's screen, is a simple and effective solution for ensuring optimum mobile compatibility.

10. Regularly monitor SEO performance

Any search engine optimisation strategy must be constantly adjusted and improved in order to achieve and maintain good results. Free and paid online tools allow you to track your position in search results for specific keywords.

To sum up, mastering the control of SEO indexing is essential to ensure that your site is properly referenced by search engines. By taking these 10 key points into account, you'll be putting all the chances on your side to achieve your objectives in terms of visibility and the acquisition of qualified traffic.