How To Let Google Know Your Website Exists

How To Let Google Know Your Website Exists

Website Development No Comment

The first step in letting Google know that your website exists, is submitting your website for indexing.

Without doing this, your website won’t have the ability to show up in search results!

Make sure you have either the the Yoast Plugin or Rank Math plugin installed for this. I prefer Rank Math. Both are free!

How To Submit URL To Google Search Console

Google’s bots crawl websites frequently and then use the information they found while crawling to display those websites in search results when relevant.

It is important to submit your website to Google so that the bots will crawl your site.

You will be able to submit your website URL to Google in just a few steps today, and this is something that you only need to do once.

What Google Bots Are Looking For When Crawling Your Website

There is actually a ton of criteria that the Google bots are looking for when crawling your website.

But the main things to focus on is the information and keywords in your title, URL, meta description, heading tags (H1, H2, ect) paragraph content and images.

Remember that when you submit your URL to Google, you are signaling to the Google bots you are ready to be indexed but this does not mean that you will automatically rank in Google or show up in any search results. Actually showing up in search queries happens with well thought-out SEO.

To easily connect your blog to Google Search Console, follow these steps.

1. Go to Google Search Console and sign in with your Google account.

2. While logged in, click the red ‘ ADD PROPERTY’ button to add your website.

3. A popup will ask for you website URL, then click the blue ‘ADD’ button.

4. Next, Click the ‘ Alternative Method’ tab. You will be given a code. Copy the code, and then paste it into your website <head> section, before the <body> section.

If you aren’t sure how to do that, you can use the free AddFunc Head & Footer Code Plugin which makes it very easy.

After that is done, you just need to click ‘verify’ in Google Search console.

Next Step – Using Rank Math SEO Plugin

The Rank Math SEO plugin is amazing and does so many things. It will be a big help in guiding you with the SEO of your blog.

Here’s how to use it to connect your Google Analytics:

How To Connect Your Blog To Google Search Console Using Rank Math

  1. Install and activate the Rank Math SEO plugin
  2. In Rank Math’s dashboard settings, click ‘Set Up Wizard’ and follow the prompts to connect your website to Google Search Console

Alternate Method: How To Connect Your Blog To Google Search Console Using Yoast

1. Having the Yoast plugin installed, from your WordPress dashboard click ‘SEO and then ‘Search Console.’ Here you will be able to connect your website to Google search console.

2. From there, click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Get Google Authorization Code.’

This will then give you a popup window, you will sign in to Google, it will give you a code. Copy the code and paste it into the box, and click the blue button ‘Authenticate.’

Your website will now be connected to Google Search Console and Yoast.

The next thing you need to do in order to submit a blog to Google, is you need to enable your sitemap in Yoast.

How To Enable Sitemap In Yoast

1. Within your WordPress dashboard, click ‘SEO’ and then ‘General.’

2. Click on the ‘Features’ tab, and make sure that XML Sitemaps is set to ‘on.’ It will look something like this:

3. View your XML Sitemap by clicking the ‘See the XML Sitemap’ link. You may have to click the question mark ( ? ) symbol to see the link.

Submit URL To Google: Final Step

If you have made it this far, it is now finally time to introduce your blog to Google.

This step will show you how to ‘Submit Sitemap to Google’ which is the final step in this ‘Submit URL to Google’ tutorial.

  1. Go to Google Search Console and select your website
  2. In the left sidebar, click Sitemaps.
  3. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps like sitemap.xml
  4. Click the Add New Sitemap button in the top
  5. Enter sitemap_index.xml into the text box that appears
  6. Click Submit

That’s all! You have officially told Google to start crawling and indexing your website.

How To Check If Your Website Is Indexed In Google

It takes a few days for Google to crawl and index your site, so it won’t show up right away in search results.

You can check if your site (or any site) has been correctly submitted to Google by searching the website address in Google like this:

Site:LocalDurhamFirst.org

How Often Do You Need To Submit A Sitemap?

Once you have submitted your sitemap, Google will start crawling it on its own. Google will crawl and re-crawl your website periodically.

If you’ve made a lot of changes to your site recently, you may want to speed up the crawling process.

To do that, you can either resubmit a new sitemap using the steps above, or you can use the Fetch as Google tool to request Google to re-index your site.

How Do You Discover What Keywords Your Blog Is Ranking For?

Many online keyword tools will make you pay to see all of the keywords your website is ranking for.

But you actually have access to all of this information for free, already!

Discover the keywords your website ranks for with this Free Keyword Rank Checker