Indexing….Kind of like a library system to find books, except with Google it is the method of finding your website. In our last blog, part 1 of this series, we discussed the mysteries surrounding Google search engines. Sounds a bit ridiculous Google can find anything, considering there are 5.43 billion pages, yes! Billion and counting! And in 2020 there are about 2 billion websites with less than 400 million active sites. So, want to know the secret ways Google has developed to actually find you?
The mystery of indexing
Google stores web pages in a vast searchable index-and so the term ‘indexing’. So, bots, Yes! Bots, Googlebot specifically…go about searching, analyzing, crawling about looking for new information, new sites and meaningful changes. This process uses more than 200 criteria and pays attention to tags, titles, meta-descriptions, alt tags and eventually ranks your standing in the search engine process.
The Google Search Process
This process does not change, it remains constant, collecting data on the web to ultimately add the content to a searchable index. It is with this in mind we pay attention to make sure that whatever you produce as content gets a bit of focused energy from the bots. Without indexing a site, you are invisible, but that can change with a bit of understanding that can ensure findability. It’s not rocket science, but there are a few simple steps that can be made, that can determine that a website gets the attention it deserves.
Neil Patel provides some insight and step by step information on how to get your site indexed faster. It pays to pay attention and use some tools that Google generously provides, their Webmaster Tools for ease of use. Other businesses, like Blue Zenith, understands the challenges of getting found. To add positive value to any website, you can help search engines crawl and index newest links, promote by using social media professional forums. It is easy to check how often Google is crawling your pages by logging into Search Console. It might bring an understanding of what happens by using the Search Console.
A sitemap
A really super easy way to determine if Google has searched any particular website is to put into a Google engine the words- site:yourdomainname.com. This simple action will let you know immediately if Google has searched your site and how many different references it has collected. If you get no results it may be time to pay more attention to your website content, specifically targeting positive recognition.
Create a content marketing strategy that will put your website out there while targeting search engines and customers attention. Start blogging, it is worth it’s weight in gold to use internal links on your website, all the while making sense to Google. Present your sitemap. Now, what is it and how does that work?
A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like, a list of pages on your website. It is a good idea to present your sitemap to Google to alert search engines to eventual changes made to a particular site. It might not affect search ranking significantly but will produce a more efficient bot crawl.
So, what do we have here? Bots, crawls, indexing, blogs, sitemaps and content, all a viable path to ensure that findability is enabled in the Google search engine processes.