There are 3 major parts to the search engines: crawler, index, and serving results. The very first thing that a website must accomplish when wanting to perform better in the search engines is to improve its crawlability. This refers to how well search engine crawlers can grab data from your website.
Search engine spiders have changed and improved over the years in how they can crawl a website, however there is still a lot that a website owner can do to improve how the crawler moves around their website. Here is a diagram of how a crawler can move through a website.
There are a variety of methods to improve the crawlability. The majority of them deal with improving the site architecture and the way you do your internal linking within your site. Here is a chart of different things you can do to improve website crawlability.
Website navigation is crucial to how a search engine spider will crawl a site and the better the pages are crafted, the better search engine spiders will be able to crawl through the site.
All images are courtesy of Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.
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