SEO

What does Indexing a Website Mean?

This is rather technical, but an important question because it is search engine indexing that allows the keywords on your website pages to be found and your website to appear in a web search. In simple terms, indexing is a process used by search engine crawlers (BOTS) to read the content on your website and store the content with keywords found in their proprietary database. This is the way keywords are used to find particular pages on your site when it is searched by an end-user.

Depending on the meta tag you use (Index or Noindex), Google will crawl and index your pages. A noindexed tag tells Google you don’t think the page is important and not to index the page. On the other hand, if the meta tag you use is index then that signals the search engine that the page is important and it will automatically be indexed (stored in the search engine’s database). Many search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., are continuously visiting (crawling) webpages and compiling keywords to include in a database (index). The index maps keywords to pages for easier data retrieval when someone is searching the web.

Here is an example: When you search for “Marketing Agencies Near Me” you get a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that looks like this.

The Noindex concept is important because you can eliminate pages from the search engine index that you know are not important or have little or no value in getting leads for your business. Some examples of low value pages might be Landing pages related to ads, Privacy Policy page, a Price List page, an Employment page, a Donate page, etc.