Let us dig a bit deep and try to know the basic concept of technical website crawls and how to perform them for search engine optimizations. Crawlers are internet bots so one should know about internet bots as well.
Internet Bot:
There are many names of internet bot, you can call it robot web robot or just bot. Basically, this word is derived from a robot. This is a designed program that runs scripts on the internet. The scripts that are reversible and not very complex, bots perform those tasks. The most common use of bots is for technical website crawls. A major portion of all the traffic on the web is generated by bots. There are many other purposes for which bots are being used. They are categorized as social bots, commercial bots, malware bots, supplementary bots and many more. Now, take a look at web crawlers and their work.
Web Crawler:
Contrary to the name, it is a high-speed moving bot. Usually, during crawling, a spider does not move fast enough, but that it is an electronic crawling and it is related to internet web crawling. A crawler is a bot that approaches World Wide Web and brings data within no time to make a searchable index, more often operated by search engines. It is also called a spider, spider bot, scraper, and sometimes in short form as simply crawler. The main use of web crawling is to search for something.
This is the basic tool of search engines and many searches-related tasks of other sites. There are a large number of sites, so a crawler cannot cover all the data with time efficiency, that’s why the search engine is the best option to use them as they narrow the area of search. There are many fields where crawlers are being used especially in hyperlinks and different hypertext languages. Moreover, data driving programs also use crawlers. Extraction of data is also the main use of technical SEO.
Types Of Crawls And Crawlers:
There are many types of crawlers. It depends on the search engine that which type of crawlers it is using. For example, for historic purposes, the World Wide Web Worm (wwww) crawler is used. Its tasks are to build an index of titles and different links to websites. Yahoo was initially used as a crawler for general searches. Nowadays Bing bot, Google bot, WebCrawler, Xenon and many other web crawlers are used for tasks assigned by their search engines. There are two types of crawls that are in practice. There may be other ways also, but the technical website crawls usually consist of these two types.
First is Spidering. In this crawl, crawlers attempt to crawl the whole site at once. They collect data from one page and link it with other pages to obtain the desired results. It is also known as site crawl. The other crawl does not search the whole site but only one page or article. It does not co-relate different links and just fetches data about one page. It is called page crawl. Now, before going into how it is necessary to know why one should do technical website crawls, we will see what is the purpose of this.
Purpose Of Technical Website Crawls:
You are well aware of the business of search engines. They are working twenty-four hours, seven days a week. They have to perform an infinite number of tasks including searching, analyzing, rearranging, ranking and many others. If we do not stay up to date with the demands of search engine optimizations, we will be ignoring our site from giving optimum results. So, to make your strategy according to the needs and analyze your work are the keys. Point out your mistakes and try to solve them as early as possible. For this purpose, you have to crawl your website for better SEO. You will be focusing on indexing your URL so that your rank on SERP can be upgraded. It is better that you make a timetable for your crawls, it would save your time, and you may not miss the important updates for optimization.
How To Crawl A Website?
We learned that why it is so important to crawl your website. Now, to perform it, there are basically two ways. One is advance crawl and the other is easy crawl. The advance crawl is a deep crawl and is recommended for experts. That is a very lengthy process in which you have to configure the URL sources, understand the domain structures, run a test crawl, test the changes and then finally run the crawl. This crawl will definitely provide you the exact results and you will be independent of other applications. If you are just a beginner and have nothing to do with the deep crawl, the other method is simple and easy. A more recommended method is using crawling tools.
According to a dissertation help firm, there are various crawling tools available for technical website crawls. There are different categories of those tools. In some, you have to pay once and in others, you will be paying according to the usage. There is free software available also, but their feedback is not much satisfactory. On the other hand, using crawling tools have many advantages. For example, you will get rid of repeated works for technical website crawls. You can save time and time is money. The scrapped data will be presented in a well-ordered manner. You can have your own choice of tools. Here we will discuss a few of them to provide an idea and to narrow the search. The recommended tools for technical website crawls are:
- Helium Scraper: It is a non-coding, non-configuration tool. It can be used to handle small elements.
- Zyte (formerly ScrapingHub): It is a cloud-based tool used for fetching data on large scale. It is highly recommended because it is open-source software. It is easy to approach and easy to use even if you do not have knowledge about coding.
- Octoparse: Here is the last but not the least. It is an excellent tool for any kind of technical website crawls. You can explore and analyze your website in any manner using Octoparse.
