In SEO, improving crawl budget is the idea that having fewer pages means search engines index your new pages and existing page updates more quickly. It involves page authority and other factors, but for non-massive sites, crawl budget isn’t a big concern…
A related idea emerges that is more important. Link equity, or the authority you gain from external links pointing to your pages, is diluted by each page on your site.
Crawl optimization, in this context, is a good practice. You can start with these steps:
- Noindex most blog tags.
- Noindex blog index pagination.
- Noindex image URLs
- Noindex pages with no SEO value i.e. thin content or simple conversion pages.
- Limit internal links to the pages above.
- Delete useless pages without valuable content or backlinks.
- If duplicate content is needed across pages, use canonicals properly.
- Have your pages load in less than 3 seconds.
- Leverage your homepage by internally linking to essential pages within the body. Use keyword-rich anchor text. For small sites, you may want to try ranking for these keywords on the homepage itself.
- Ensure pages with less valuable content, yet some backlinks, internally link to important ones.
- For important pages buried deeper in your site, consider including them under a subcategory dropdown in your navigation to decrease click depth.