Get a search engine crawler to do what you want it to do? You bet!

I’m always talking to clients about the need to “train the crawlers.” Once a crawler finds your site and indexes it, you can teach the crawler to come back on a regular basis. And once you’ve got the crawlers trained, you’ll start seeing some real benefits with your search engine visibility.

How to Train the Crawlers

It’s quite simple: Write lots of great content and add it to your site on a regular basis. Keep in mind that I said “simple”, which is a far cry from “easy.” Adding regular content to your web site is a real challenge for most small businesses, but if you commit to a good plan and follow through, there are real benefits to be had.

Benefits

There’s no evidence to suggest that a regularly-updated site will necessarily rank higher than a site that’s not updated as often. If that were the case, everyone would be making useless site updates every day.

The benefit of adding new, quality content to your site on a regular basis is that you can train the SE crawlers to come back to your site more often. If you post a newsletter every week, the crawlers will eventually visit your site every week — if not more often.

And here’s the real benefit: Once you’ve got the crawlers trained to visit your site on a regular basis, it’s much easier to get new product pages, new services, new anything indexed and into the SERPs, able to be found by searchers. And that’s great marketing for your business — it’s a chance to get your site “first to market”, ahead of your competition, when new products or services are announced.

So develop a plan to add fresh content to your web site regularly, train the crawlers to visit often, and then take advantage of the ability to get more pages indexed quicker than ever before.