If you’re running a website, it’s important to make sure that it is indexed by search engines. If your site isn’t indexed, it won’t show up in search engine results pages (SERPs), which means that you’ll miss out on potential traffic and customers. But how do you get your new website indexed?
Why isn’t your website indexed automatically by Google? The short answer is: because you need to tell Google that your website exists. Google (and other search engines) are constantly crawling the web, looking for new websites to add to their indexes. However, they can’t index a website if they don’t know that it exists.
So, if you want to make sure that your website is indexed by Google (and other search engines), there are a few things you need to do. Below, we’ve broken down the process to ensure long-term success for your website. Remember, an SEO agency USA will assist if you aren’t confident in achieving this alone.
Step 1: Submit Your Website to Google Search Console
When your website is up and running, the first thing you need to do is submit it to Google Search Console. This is a free tool provided by Google that allows website owners to submit their website’s sitemap.xml file directly to Google. This ensures that Google knows your website exists and will start indexing it right away.
Step 2: Optimize Your Website’s Title and Description Tags
One of the most important things you can do to help your website get indexed by Google is to optimize your website’s title and description tags. These are the tags that appear in the search results when someone searches for a keyword related to your website. By optimizing these tags, you can help your website rank higher in the search results and get more traffic.
While the title tag is the blue link that visitors will hopefully click on, the description tag is the black text beneath the blue link that gives visitors a little more information about what they’ll find on your website. Without optimizing these aspects of your website, you’re missing out on valuable traffic and potential customers.
Step 3: Optimize Your Webpages for Keywords
The next step in indexing your website is to optimize your web pages for the keywords you want to rank for. This means using those keywords throughout your website content, including in the title, headings, and body text. You should also use them in the metatags and image alt tags.
After the first couple of steps, your website might have the ability to appear in search results, but it still won’t without the right content. Every year, Google’s ability to read genuinely useful content on websites improves, so it’s more important than ever to make sure your website has well-written, keyword-rich content. Rather than just stuffing keywords into content, answer questions and provide a valuable service.
Step 4: Continually Learn and Improve
After you’ve completed all of the above steps, your website should be indexed and appear in search results. However, the work doesn’t stop there. To maintain a high ranking, you need to continually monitor your website and make sure it is up to date with the latest trends. Google is constantly changing its algorithms, so what worked last year might not work this year. As long as you stay on top of the latest trends and keep your content fresh, you should be able to maintain a high ranking.
If you’re not sure how to do this or don’t have the time, consider hiring an SEO consultant!