Submitting your website to the Google search engine is an important part of increasing your traffic. Once it is submitted, your site will appear on the Google search results page, but what you should be striving for is getting it to rank highly in your potential customers’ searches.
“Lots of my customers have commented on how easy it was to find and use my website – that wouldn’t be possible without Go Sitebuilder and my own domain name.” Polly Evans – pollyevanshypnotherapy.com
Here is a guide on getting your website to appear in Google searches:
Search Engine Optimisation
Better known as SEO, this is the process of optimising the content of your website to make it rank highly in Google search results without having to pay for it. It is good practice to optimise your website before submitting it to Google, but really it is an ongoing process that needs to be nurtured in the long run to see the best results.
Submitting a website to Google
Make sure you have covered all the basics of preparing your website to be indexed by Google. SEO is important, but it’s also essential to ensure there are no errors or broken links, and that content is ready to be shared on social media. When you’re good to go, you can submit your domain to the Google Search Console URL Crawler.
Every time they crawl the web, Google adds new sites to its index and updates existing ones. Tell them about your new URL through the link above. Please note that not all submitted URLs will be added to the index.
Google will also want your website sitemap. The purpose of this is to enable the Google robots to scan the structure of your site and index it to the search engine accordingly. If you’ve built your website with Go Site Builder, it will already be available to them and you won’t have to do anything extra to submit it.
Google Search Console
This service replaced the old Google Webmaster Tools to provide site owners with the means to monitor their site’s presence in the Google search results. Joining requires a Google account and a personal domain address. You simply add these as your property on the console and follow the steps to verify your site ownership.
The simplest method is to choose ‘URL prefix’, which should provide you with a code. Copy the code and paste it in into your website, and you should see a confirmation in Google Search Console shortly after.
The bottom line
Getting your website onto Google search should be a simple process. If you follow the steps in this guide, you will be up and running in no time. Go Sitebuilder provides the tools to make it even easier, and you can get started for free today.
