Over at the Search Engine Journal, the resident writer Ann Smarty has written an extremely interesting post about how Webmasters can increase the Google Crawl rate for their websites.

It is every important to understand one simple concept and it is that, you can never force or cheat Googlebot into crawling your website. But you can always employ certain steps, that would ensure that Googlebot gets attracted to your content and crawls it. Here are a few ways to do just exactly that:

• You should always update your content as soon as possible, because this effort really helps. You should update or add new content to your website at least 3 times a week (minimum) and then should immediately ‘ping’ (notify) Google.

• Page load time is another critical factor to be taken care of. If the crawler spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDF files, there will be no time left for it to visit your other pages.

• Double check your internal link structure. That means keep an open eye for any duplicate content that might arise via different URLs.

• It is imperative that your server should always return correct header response.

• Another great way to invite Googlebot is to assign unique title and meta-tags for each of your pages.

Following these steps, would make your content look attractive to Googlebot and will compel it to crawl your website.