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Websites need visitors, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the vast majority of those visitors will come from Google – people will search for something online, and, hopefully, find your site. So clearly then, if your website isn’t listed on Google (note: Google won’t always detect and list brand new websites automatically), you’re in big trouble! So what to do? How can you ensure Google knows everything it needs to about your WordPress-powered website?
Let’s take a look…
How Do I Get My Website On Google:
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video we’re going to answer the question, how do I get my WordPress website listed on Google? Let me show you. The first thing you want to do is prepare your website. This is a normal WordPress dashboard, and the first thing you want to do is go down to Settings, Reading, and there’s a switch right here labeled Search Engine Visibility. And if it’s checked, it will discourage search engines from indexing this site. Now this is great while you’re building your site and you don’t want Google to look. But once it’s live and you want Google to come see your site, this must be unchecked, or nothing else you do will matter. The next thing you should do is have SEO-ready content. I recommend getting an SEO plugin like Yoast. It has tips to help guide you as you setup your content. When you create a post, there’s a box right here to help you setup keywords, focus keywords, add your Google snippet, et cetera. So this plugin helps make the content on your site be something that Google wants to crawl. Next, you should have a sitemap. A sitemap is an XML document that lists every page and post on your site, and presents it to Google in a way that Google likes. Fortunately, Yoast SEO helps create one. Here under the SEO tab, there’s XML Sitemaps. And you can simply turn it on. Once it’s on you can click this link to view your sitemap. So here it lists all the different kinds of content you have, and when you click one it shows all the different items in that kind of content. So, these are all posts, and these are all pages. So when Google comes to my site and wants to know what’s here, it looks first for a sitemap. And it can quickly and easily read through the entire sitemap rather than having to read through all the source code on webpages. Another thing you should do is check your robots.txt file. Do you see how sitemap_index.xml is just right here on the end of my URL? You can do the same with robots.txt. Mine says, for all user-agents, which means all web browsers, disallow searching wp-admin. However, allow admin-ajax.php, and then by default because it doesn’t say anything else, it allows everything else. So my robots.txt file right now is saying that search engines can look at everything on my site, except wp-admin. Now if you don’t have one of these files, that’s just fine. Google will take that to mean that it can search everything. Now once you have your site prepped and ready for Google, we want to signup for Google Webmasters. This is a relatively new website that is not registered with Google, so we’re gonna set it up together. You can search for Google Webmasters, and you want this item right here at the top. Now Google Webmasters is a program that helps you learn about good SEO, how to make good websites, et cetera. The primary tool here is the Search Console, so we’re going to use that. Now I’m already logged into Google. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create one on any Google property, and use it across the board. So you could use your Gmail address. You could use your YouTube address. Any address on a Google property will work here. Now as you can see, I have a number of sites already setup, but we’re going to setup this brand new one called Eclectic Jams. So let’s click this red button, Add a Property. We could choose whether it’s a website or an Android app, and then we’d put in the address. And then click Add. Now we need to prove that we own this website. Now the recommended way for proving that we own the website is by using Google Analytics, which we also have not setup yet. So let’s leave this tab right here and go signup for Google Analytics. There it is right at the top. Now, we see this page because I have Google Analytics setup on another site. If you did not, this would be blank, and that would be just fine. What we really want is this Admin button down here on the bottom left. Click Admin. And then under Account, we Create new account. And we’re going to choose Website, and we’re going to create an account name. And then we put in the website name. Note, this is not the URL, this is just the name. Then here we put in the address, and we choose whether it’s HTTP or HTTPS. Then we can choose an industry. And a reporting timezone. Then Google wants to know if it can share your data with other services. I’m going to go ahead and say Yes. So now I get a Tracking ID, and I accept their terms of service, and right here is the Tracking ID. Now, to get that Tracking ID into our website, we’re going to use a plugin. The plugin we’re going to use is called MonsterInsights. Now that MonsterInsights is active, we can go over here to Insights, Dashboard. And the first thing it says is we must authenticate. So let’s authenticate with our Google account. Now because I’m already logged in with Google, it can talk to Google. It wants to view and manage our Google Analytics data, and view our Google Analytics data, so we’ll Allow, and then we copy this code. We paste it in here. Next we need to choose a profile, and there’s our Eclectic Jams site, and there’s that code they said we needed to have in our site. And there we are. I’ll Save Changes. So now we have Google Analytics setup which means we can come back to the Search Console, and we’ll choose Verify. Now because we had Google Analytics setup and our code was in our HTML in our website, the console was able to see that yes indeed we do own this site. And now we continue. Now this is the Google Search Console, and after awhile it’ll have a lot of really interesting information. But we don’t have any traffic yet, but what we’re looking for right now is this Crawl option. There’s Fetch as Google, and we’ll just click Fetch. There, now Google went and checked out our website. Now I’m going to request indexing, and I must say I am not a robot. And I want to crawl only this URL, and then I’ll click Go. Now, indexing is requested. Now at some point, Google is going to go index my website, and that’s what’s going to get it listed. Now, there is no published schedule for this sort of thing. Google’s going to do it when it gets around to it. Probably quite soon. It’s probably going to crawl it today, but they make no promises. And then, even once it’s indexed they also make no promises about getting it listed on Google search. It can take months and sometimes years to get highly ranked in Google. Based on the amount of traffic you get, the quality of your website, the frequency of change in your website, and how many other people link to your website. Now we’ve covered a lot of material in this video, so let’s recap. First you want to prepare your site. Check the Search Engine Visibility switch in your settings in WordPress. Then, have SEO-ready content, and I recommend getting a plugin to help you with that. Next, have a sitemap. A good SEO plugin can create one for you. Check your robots.txt file, and make sure that it is not blocking everything. Next, signup for Google Analytics. Then install MonsterInsights and connect your site to Google. MonsterInsights has an excellent walkthrough to help you with every detail. Lastly, signup at Google Webmasters so that you can use the Google Console. Once you’re in the Google Console, add your property, which is your website. Then go to the Crawl section and ask Google to fetch your site. Once they do they give you the option to ask Google to index your site. Once they’ve indexed your site once, they’ll keep an eye on it. They’ll check back periodically. And depending on how often your site changes, and how much traffic you get, they will begin to check back more and more frequently. If your site never changes, they’ll probably only check back about once a month. But if your site changes regularly, they may check back several times a day. And again, I want to remind you, all of the things we’ve done here tell Google that our site exists and asks them nicely to index it. This isn’t a promise that you will get listed, although it’s likely you will. And even if you do get listed, it can take time to get highly listed. So be patient, follow the steps, and at some point you will see your site on Google. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, check out WinningWP.com.
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