9 Tips to Optimize Crawl Budget for SEO

When you hear the words “search engine optimization,” what do you think of? My mind leaps straight to a list of SEO ranking factors, such as proper tags, relevant keywords, a clean sitemap, great design elements, and a steady stream of high-quality content.

However, a recent article by my colleague, Yauhen Khutarniuk, made me realize that I should be adding “crawl budget” to my list. While many SEO experts overlook crawl budget because it’s not very well understood, Khutarniuk brings some compelling evidence to the table – which I’ll come back to later in this post – that crawl budget can, and should, be optimized.

This made me wonder: how does crawl budget optimization overlap with SEO, and what can websites do to improve their crawl rate?

First Things First – What Is a Crawl Budget?
Web services and search engines use web crawler bots, aka “spiders,” to crawl web pages, collect information about them, and add them to their index. These spiders also detect links on the pages they visit and attempt to crawl these new pages too.