If you’ve built a website, it’s critical you ensure it’s visible to your prospective audience. One way to do this is by getting it indexed on Google. In this blog post, we will guide you through the process of getting your website on Google in a few simple steps.
Step 1: Ensure Your Site is Ready for Google’s Index
Before your website can appear in Google’s search results, it must be crawlable and indexable. This means that Google’s bots must be able to find and understand your website’s content.
Ensure your website has a clear navigation structure and is free from any broken links. It’s also important to make sure you have a robots.txt file that allows Google bots to crawl your site.
Step 2: Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site. Google reads this file to more intelligently crawl your site. Sitemaps can be created manually or through a sitemap generator.
Here’s a basic example of what a sitemap may look like:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> <lastmod>2020-06-04</lastmod> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>
Step 3: Submit Your Sitemap to Google
Once your sitemap is ready, you need to submit it to Google via Google Search Console. If you don’t have a Search Console account, create one, and then add and verify your website. Post verification, go to ‘Sitemaps’ and enter the URL of your sitemap, then hit ‘Submit’.
Step 4: Monitor Your Website’s Performance
After submitting your sitemap, Google will start crawling your website. It’s important to monitor your website’s performance to ensure it’s being crawled and indexed properly.
You can use Google Search Console’s Coverage report to see if there are any issues that might prevent Google from crawling or indexing your site.
Conclusion
Getting your website on Google isn’t hard, but it does require some effort and time. However, by following these steps and staying patient, you’ll soon start seeing your website in Google’s search results.