Your website’s ranking in Google will largely determine how your site performs. If your site is one of the main sources of conversions for your business, figuring out how to get your site ranking on the first page of Google is crucial. Proper website indexing allows search engines to see all of your important pages and gives your site a major boost. It can even send you on your way to page one.
How Website Indexing Works
To index your site, Google must be able to find it. In order to do this, they use little snippets of codes that they call “bots” or “spiders” to crawl your website and go through all of your pages. While the bots are crawling your site, they collect bits of information that help them understand what your site is about. This is why SEO is so important if you want your site to rank.
Each factor that a bot picks up can be a ranking signal for Google, telling the search engine what information is available to web users. Through these factors, Google decides where to index or rank your page. It can choose to index the page towards the top of page one for a search query or towards the bottom of the results, depending on how relevant the information is.
What Factors Help a Site Index?
When you’re ready to index your site or help it to index faster, there are a few things you can do.
- Setup Google Analytics & Google Search Console – Google loves when people use their products. Not only will their analytics and Search Console platforms allow you to see site ranking and traffic, they also play a role in website indexing.
- Regularly update your content – This doesn’t just mean updating the content that’s already on the site, though that helps. You also need to be adding new, relevant content on a regular basis. This allows Google to see how useful your site is for people inputting search queries. Fresh and unique content is vital in the Google world.
- Add a sitemap – XML and HTML sitemaps are both crucial to indexing success. A sitemap lists links to all of the pages and elements on your site, making them incredibly accessible to bots. The easier and quicker a bot can crawl your site, the more likely they are to return and check for updates and fresh information.
- Get other sites to share links to your site – This is probably one of the hardest elements of SEO. Google strongly frowns upon buying links back to your site and will penalize you for it. However, you need these links. Building relationships with others who complement your business with guest blogging or having them share your content (using a dofollow command) will help Google find your site in other places around the web.
While this list isn’t comprehensive, it’s a strong start for website indexing.
How to Achieve Website Indexing Faster
As you can probably tell, getting your site indexed is important; however, we can’t oversell the importance of website indexing for the success of your site. Don’t waste your own time worrying about how to index a site. Instead, focus on working with a full-service web marketing firm that can help you get your site ranking faster and more efficiently.
At Dreamscape Marketing, we have proven time and again that a proper SEO campaign can help a site to rank on the first page of Google. Let us help you. Give us a call today at 888.307.7304 for an SEO audit.