How to index new blog on Google quickly
When was the last time you went to a website directly to get information
without searching for it? With the advent of a digital world, billions of
information have been made easily accessible using “Search engines”
and as you read this, Google is still the No1 search engine with about 4.3
billion users worldwide, huge right! With these values, most businesses
and websites want to be ranked high on Google and if not even gaining a
high rank,at least getting Google to index their blog quickly is
commendable.
When people search using keywords, Google employs its index to fetch
the relevant content match for the search. This simply means if your blog
isn’t indexed on Google, then you are missing out on 4.3 billion users
that have the opportunity to see your blog which in other ways can be
disastrous to your blog.
Organic search traffic is so important to your blog’s growth that it claims
53% of your site’s traffic(seoinc.com). Meanwhile, these stats don’t
count if your blog doesn’t show up in search results at all.
How do you get your new blog indexed by Google?
You have two choices.
You may decide to take the slow approach just to sit back and watch
after publishing a post for it to happen naturally, this should take you
two weeks and sometimes, months and this is not fun.
Or you may decide to make it happen now which will thereby give you
more time and energy to put towards increasing your conversion rate
and promoting great and beneficial contents.
And If I were to choose , I’d rather have my site indexed as fast as
possible because it will create more time for me to build my audience.
The strategies I’d be sharing have helped Neil Patel grow his blog to over
600,000 thousand monthly visitors within a very short period.
Do you want to try the same strategy?
Let’s ride on because I’d be taking you through all the strategies step by
step.
What is Google Index and why do you need Google to index your blog?
Google Index is a collection of all web pages that has been Crawled and
Identified by Google. If your blog is not Indexed by Google, then it is
100% not going to appear on Google search and you won’t have any
organic traffic whatsoever.
So How does Google Index?
Google discovers new web pages or blog posts by crawling the web, and
then they add those pages to their index. They do this using web spiders
called bots.
Do you find some strange words here? Let’s break them down.
● Crawling: This is the process of using hyperlinks on the web to
discover new contents.
● Bots: These are Google’s software that systematically searches the
web for new content by following links,they do the crawling.
● Indexing: The Process of storing every web page in a vast database.
So whenever a search is made, you are asking Google to return
everything related to the search from their index and here, we have
millions of content to be displayed. This is where ranking comes in to
fetch out the most relevant and if you were thinking indexing and
ranking are the same, then by now you should know they are different.
Indexing is showing up for the race; ranking is winning.
You can’t win without showing up for the race in the first place
(ahrefs.com).
How often your blog is indexed can affect your blog performance in
search results and you would also want to make sure your latest content
is available for those searching and for the bots too all the time.
So here are steps to take in order to get your blog indexed as quickly as
possible.
Step1 1: Confirming if your blog is already indexed.
Unless you have a new blog, your blog is most likely to have been
indexed.
If you are not sure,here is a simple way to find out:
Go to Google and search site:yourdomain.com . if Google knows your site
exists and has already crawled it, you will see it in the results.
Step 2: Submit your blog to Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free platform created by Google to help
publishers and bloggers check their sites indexing and how visible they
are on Google.
In order to make use of the Google search Console,
1. You need to sign up with your Google account at Google Search
Console.
2. Then, add a new web property, enter your site name.
3. Verify your blog by using the verification tool provided and adding
it to your blog. This code can be added to the theme’s header.php or if
you are using a child theme, you can insert it using plugins like Headers
and Footers for WordPress.
As soon as this verification takes place, it will be a sign to Google that
your site exists.
Ste 3: Submit your sitemap
Your sitemap is a file where you tell Google and other search engines
how you have organized the content of your website. Although search
engines can examine your site without this file, they can do so more
intelligently when you have a sitemap in place.
Using sitemaps is particularly useful for large websites, very new
websites or sites with pages that are not well linked together, and
probably sites with rich media content.
You may already have a sitemap, created automatically. For a blog owner,
most platforms provide you with an RSS file,which you can also submit as
a sitemap. Check your hosting service or blogging platform support to
see where this file is located.
Step 4: Install and set up Google Analytics
Google analytics measures stats about your website like visitors, time
spent on the site, what pages they looked at and where they are from. To
set up Google analytics, here are few steps to take;
1. Visit analytics.google.com
2. Sign in with your Google account.
3. After you log in, then click Sign up.
4. Enter your blog/website name , then click get tracking ID.
5. If you are using wordpress or other CMS requesting for your
Google Analytics tracking ID, just paste the tracking ID.
6. For the WordPress plugin Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is
really easy to set up.
7. After downloading the plugin, ‘Authenticate’ it and it will walk you
through the rest.
Meanwhile, if you are not using WordPress and you are required to paste
it manually, all you need to do is to copy the code written on Website
tracking on the analytics page and paste on all your website pages.
Step 5 : Create a Content Marketing Strategy:
Writing a content marketing strategy that is centered on search results is
a good one, but that’s not all. According to Content Marketing Institute:
Those with documented content marketing strategy:
● Are far more likely to consider themselves effective at content
marketing.
● Don’t feel too challenged when it comes to every aspect of content
marketing.
● Are able to justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing
budget on content marketing.
In addition, keeping your focus on goals, a documented content strategy
also helps your site get indexed by creating new pages of content.
According to Hubspot’s “ Notanother state of marketing report 2020’’,
60% of content marketers said content is very important to their overall
strategy.
Another study found that companies that use content marketing enjoy
conversion rates that are six times higher. A very cogent reason why you
should get your blog indexed on Google.
Step 6: Use Internal Links on your blog
Internal link which refers to you linking to other blogs on your website is
another great way to get indexed on Google and it increases your
position in organic search results.
One very obvious way of internal links is your website navigation. Ensure
it is in such a way that it is easily understood by Google.
Step 7: Check for Google Crawl errors frequently
This is a very Important step as it helps in maintaining your indexing
frequency. Checking it at least once a month is highly encouraged.
To check for crawl errors
1. Open search console
2. On left click on settings
3. Then Crawl stats.
4. Then open the report.
Step 8: Ensure pages that shouldn’t be indexed are not.
Pages such as Thank you page and Duplicate blog content shouldn’t be
indexed. Here are highlighted steps to achieve this
● Blocking a page from being indexed using robots.txt
● Using a nofollow or noindex links
Step 9: Updating Old contents.
From everything we have learned so far;
Everytime you update a new blog, Google wants to crawl it more often
and a good way to capitalize on this is to frequently update your
contents.
All that indexing, and new information means that updating your old
posts can increase your organic search by 111%.
So what are you waiting for? Go and apply these 9 Golden steps to your
blog.