Regardless of the niche and purpose of a website, there is one universal goal it strives for: attracting more organic traffic.
Why is that so important?
Well think about it from a user’s perspective. What do you do when you need to find a solution, product, or service? You use Google. You type a few words or phrases, and you wait for the search engine to give you the options.
Google’s bots have indexed those pages, and now the search engine recommends them as relevant to your query. When you click on one of those links, you contribute to the site’s organic search traffic. That’s because they earned a Google index by meeting its standards.
Let’s explain the concept of website indexation before we move onto some practical tips on how to get your site indexed.
What Does It Mean for Google to Index My Site?
If you’re a complete beginner with your own online project, you’ve probably been wondering how Google chooses the most relevant results for each query.
All search engines send crawlers to new websites. They collect all kinds of data, so they can figure out what the content is about. After this crawling process, they index the data that they collected. They add your pages to categories with similar pages. This way, the search engine’s job is simpler: it can recommend better resources to its users.
Now you may wonder: “When will Google crawl my site and how can I get the content indexed?” Crawling and indexing are complex processes. They take some time. Google does not give definite answers, but it’s estimated that it might take a few days to four weeks.
Is there a way to speed things up?
Tips: How to Get Your WordPress Site Indexed Faster
- Invest in a High-Quality Hosting Service
WordPress sites can be launched and maintained without an investment. But you’ll benefit in multiple ways by investing in a good hosting provider:
- Your website will load faster
- The dashboard will be more effective
- You won’t experience any downtime issues
In essence, bad hosting makes your website slow. That’s a red alert for Google’s bots. When they try to index your website, the downtime and disconnections will cause them to stop the session. This doesn’t happen often, but it does.
It’s in your best interest to invest in top-quality hosting, which would make your website faster and more reliable.
Don’t worry; you won’t have to pay a lot. You can get a brilliant hosting service for $2 – $4 per month.
- Set Up an XML Sitemap
The sitemap is a simple XML file, which lists and categorizes all URLs within your website. This is a very important step to take, since the map informs the bots whenever you add new pages on your site.
According to Google’s webmasters, your sitemap informs the search engine about the URLs on your site. It’s particularly useful if the content isn’t easy for the crawlers to discover.
But you won’t just create a XML sitemap. You should submit sitemap to Google Search Console.
You’ll find the option under Site Configuration > Sitemaps > Add/Test Sitemap. Here, you’ll only submit a link to your sitemap.
- Connect Google Analytics & Google Search Console with Your WordPress Site
Google Search Console is much more than a place where you submit a sitemap. It’s an essential tool that lets you monitor how your website performed when the search engine’s bots were crawling it. It will help you discover any security issues, indexing errors, and other problems that might have interfered with the indexing process.
Google Analytics is also important. It tells you how your site performs from a user’s point of view. You get information on their location, the time they spent on your pages, their journey within your website, and all kinds of data that helps you improve their overall experience.
To integrate these tools with your site, you can use the Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin by MonsterInsights.
- Get Good Backlinks to Your Site
You want the crawlers to find your pages through direct links. When they crawl sites with high authority, and they find your pages through that content, they associate you with that high authority.
If you’re into SEO for a long time, you probably remember the article directories. They were a great place to post some average content with multiple links. Yeah; those techniques no longer work. You need backlinks from good websites, and you need to get them through the most natural anchors possible.
Start by checking the quality of the current backlinks to your site. You can do that with a free site analyzer. If you notice links from sites that could ruin your reputation, you should start a process to remove them.
You can do that by contacting the website’s owner or submitting a disavow backlinks request through the Google Search Console.
As for getting good links, you should simply focus on developing top-quality content. If you produce unique case studies and research articles with reliable statistics, influential bloggers will link to those resources.
You can also rely on guest blogging. You’ll develop connections with reliable websites that accept guest posts. Your link can be included in the BIO, but you can also add it to the content if it’s highly relevant. Each website has different guest blogging guidelines, so make sure to check them before you start working on your post.
- Publish High-Quality Content… A Lot of It
Getting your website indexed is not the only goal that you have. Sure; you want those crawlers on your pages. But when they get there, you want them to see high-quality content that deserves a good rank in the search results.
An empty or lousy site will not get you any organic traffic through the search engine.
Google cares about two things the most: the quality and relevance of your content. It has to deliver value to the reader, so you should answer their questions in the most specific way possible. It must be original, too. Don’t even think about paraphrasing or copying content from other websites. It’s time for all of us to stop taking the search engine for an idiot. It’s smarter than we realize.
- Set Up an RSS Feed
You don’t have to submit URL to Google whenever you create a new page. If you have an automated RSS feed, it will be updated whenever you launch a new page.
RSS stands for rich site summary. It serves tons of data to the crawlers in an easy-to-digest way. Essentially, it’s a collection of simple text files with blog posts. However, the files can contain video, images, and other types of content as well.
It’s an old technique, but it’s not outdated just yet. The deed instantly distributes your new content to subscribers, and you don’t even need their email addresses. With this, you get more readers for your fresh content. The crawlers will notice that.
Yes, It’s a Lot of Work
We won’t try to make this seem easier than it is. Getting a new WordPress site indexed involves some work, but it’s something that you have to do.
When you started the site, you were committed to make it work. Now, you have a chance to do it.
The above-listed steps are quite easy:
- Invest in good hosting
- Set up a sitemap
- Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console for your site
- Start posting great content
- Get high-quality backlinks
- Set up an RSS feed
Start with the hosting, which is the most essential and the easiest thing to do for a start. Then, you’ll progress through the steps. Eventually, you’ll get your website not only indexed but ranked well, too.
I am David, the author of the blog https://carnesmechanical.com am interested in internet marketing and sales. On our blog I do reviews of various products.