SEO On-Air: Lesson One in SEO-Ensuring Crawlability and Indexability

In this episode, we cover:

Today, we speak to Francois Goub, the CEO of oncrawl.com, the most reliable data platform. A serial entrepreneur, Francois, has founded several companies and is actively involved in the startup ecosystem. He loves to analyze scientific Google publications and is a real enthusiast of semantic analysis and search engines.

In this episode, he will speak on the topic,” Lesson One in SEO-Ensuring Crawlability and Indexability.”

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Loren Gray, decodes ways to do digital marketing for the hospitality industry during the COVID-19 crisis.

Show Notes Explanation

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of SEO On-Air. Imagine you write the most amazing content in the world. You publish it in your blog, and the search engines don’t pick it up. You keep wondering what went wrong.

You can build the best content to beat your competitors, but without proper technical SEO, Google bot won’t be able to discover your content.

So, the number 1 lesson in SEO is ensuring indexability and crawlability. To discuss this topic, we have Mr. Francois Goub, the CEO of oncrawl.com, the most reliable data platform

Time Stamp: 01:39-05:06

Q. Can you share more details about the OnCrawl tool with us?

• OnCrawl is an SEO data platform dedicated to technical SEO
• We have a crawler that can crawl up to hundreds of millions of pages
• With the crawler, we see a site through Google’s eyes and create crawl reports using 500 metrics
• We tried to build data explorer to let people access all data at their fingertips

Time Stamp: 05:26-06:16

Q. How important are log files for SEOs?

• If you look at the early days of the web and note the webmaster forums, you will see that a lot of webmasters were looking at log files because they were the only source of data.
• It is fun to see that they are coming back. Lock files are very important because it contains everything in your logs

Time Stamp: 06:32-09:15

Q. What are the critical factors that OnCrawl checks while doing log file analysis?

• One of the main things that are affecting all websites is orphan pages. These are pages that are not linking from your internal linking structure. Since those pages won’t be ranking but are still consuming crawl budget for no reason.
• With OnCrawl, you can shortlist these orphan pages and correct them by redirecting or linking them.

Time Stamp: 11:14-14:09

Q. How can a website achieve the perfect load time?

• Google is accessing a dump of pages, and when the dump is loading below 500 milliseconds, you are doing it right.
• You need to be very careful about having a very light payload and check usage metrics daily
• The second problem is Javascript, which is very difficult for search engines to index.
• Be careful about the rendering time of your website and the site’s crawlability and indexability

Time Stamp: 15:05-19:29

Q. Does your tool has the feature to resolve duplicate content issues on a site?

When you’re looking at the top pages of your sites, analyze the common characteristics of those pages and their content. Then build a content strategy based on the analysis.

Time Stamp: 20:13-23:13

Q. Is it required that we put all the pages of a website in the sitemap or only include those that really matter?

• I believe a well-built site doesn’t need a sitemap
• Generally, all the main pages in your site should be displayed in your sitemap
• If you think your content will automatically get indexed if they are in the sitemap, but you are not providing any value to those pages will not benefit you

Time Stamp: 23:43-24:40

Q. What would be your suggestions for startup owners for getting more organic traffic on their site?

• They should have their technical SEO perfectly set up, or they will develop an “SEO debt”
• The should do some great content marketing and lead nurturing too
• Having an SEO guy at the start of a company is a great investment