Getting higher ranking on Google SERPs is a dream of every website owner. Once after launching a WordPress website, you need to optimize your site for getting your site indexed by Google.

It is impossible for Google to show your site or content in its search results if it hasn’t indexed your site. Of course, all the time and efforts you invested should be paid off in terms of higher web traffic and increased revenues. So, make sure your website is properly crawled and indexed by Google.

Well, the entire process of getting good SEO ranking is not as easy as we think. There are many aspects that you need to consider while optimizing your site for search engines. If you are a beginner, then you should explore the basics on how Google finds, reads and index a website and what are the key aspects that can help you optimize the ranking of your WordPress site.

Here in this blog post, we will cover all these topics to help you get your WordPress site indexed by Google quickly and easily.

Let’s get started!

How Does Google Search Works?

As a beginner, you always want to know how Google finds a website on the Internet. Since thousands of websites launched every day, it becomes quite difficult to gain visibility on web platforms. But the best part is that there is a systematic procedure that Google follows to search and index a site.

Let’s delve into the basics of search engines to know more about it:

• Search Spiders / Googlebot: Search spiders are automated programs that allow Google to discover the content of your site quickly and easily. Since all the conventional search engines have their own spiders, Google uses Googlebot to crawl and index a website. It collects information about the web pages of a site to let Google index it in search results.

• Crawling Process of Google: Under the crawling process, Googlebot searches the web to see new and updates pages that need to be added to the Google index. It simply scours what to crawl by making the use of links. It thoroughly crawls your site to see new pages and blog posts within your site.

  Google starts the crawl process by accessing the list of web page URLs, taken from past crawls, and the Sitemap data submitted by webmasters. When a crawler accesses these sites, they search for links on each web page and adds them to its list of pages for crawling. It usually focuses more on new websites, dead links, and websites that have recently updated their web pages or posts.

• Indexing Process: Under this process, Google collects all the web pages from its crawling process and creates the searchable index. Google will index a site if it finds unique and quality content.

  During indexing process, Google search bot processes the words on a page and also analyze the title tags and ALT attributes to gather more information about a website. Google will index all these information into the search results to let web audience see your site in search engines.

The above information will help you know more about the Google search engine process and how your WordPress site gets visibility on search engine platform. But the problem occurs when Google doesn’t index a site on their search results. So, first check whether your site is indexed on Google search results or not. Type your site’s URL into the Google search bar to see the results. If you don’t see your site, then you need to do more hard work to make it indexed by Google.

Below are the few reasons that restricts Google from indexing your site:

• It may happen because of any technical issues or faulty configuration
• Badly configured SEO settings
• It can happen due to violation of any Google’s terms and condition
• Poorly configured .htaccess file
• Incorrect configurations of URL parameters
• Google hasn’t got enough time to add it to their index because your site is too new

These are common issues faced by WordPress site owners when they see no results on Google search pages.

Tip: So, cross-check the issues and delve into the rabbit’s hole to find out the relevant solution.

Below are the few tips and tricks that will help you index your WordPress site by Google quickly and efficiently. You just need to consider the following tips to let Google find your site instantly:

1. Quality of Content Matters a Lot

You should focus on creating quality and unique content if you want your site to get indexed by Google quickly. Having a site with crappy or duplicate content might get indexed but won’t be able to generate higher ranking on SERPs. If your site’s content is duplicate, then there is a possibility of your site getting penalized when Google update their search Algorithm. So, there is no use of getting your site indexed if you don’t have great content.

So, make sure you create high-quality, original, and informative content while setting up your WordPress site. Try to add your main keyword within your content to get higher ranking on search engine ranking pages. Even, you can use blog posts, articles, and other content to promote your business across multiple web channels and social media platforms.

2. Disable/Un-tick “Discourage Search Engines” option

If the “Discourage Search Engines” option is enabled in your WordPress settings, then your site won’t get indexed by Google. It won’t show your site on any search result because of the settings in your WordPress.

Most of the developers enable this option while creating a development version of a site, so make sure that you un-tick this option in order to encourage Google to read and index your site for better ranking.

3. Build an XML Sitemap of your WordPress site

You should create an XML sitemap that includes a complete list of all the contents available on your site.

It basically tells Google and other search engines about the different web pages and posts of your website. A sitemap act as a roadmap of your site that allows search spiders to read, crawl and index your site with ease.

Use Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create an XML sitemap of your WordPress site so that Google and other search engines to index your website instantly.

4. Submit your Sitemap to Google

There is no use of creating a sitemap until you submit it to the Google. It is important for you to allow search engines to know where your sitemap is actually located within your site – this can index your site’s content instantly.

You can do this by submitting your sitemap to the Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have an account on it, then create a free Google account > sign up for Webmaster Tools > add your site to Webmaster tools > optimization > Sitemaps and add the link to your site’s sitemap to Webmaster Tools to let Google know about it.

Once Webmaster Tools connected to your site, visit your account and access Crawl >Sitemaps. Now click on Add/Test Sitemap. Thereafter, you just need to include the address of your sitemap to the end of your domain such as mysite.com/sitemap.xml.

5. Add Google Analytics into your site

Don’t forget to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site. It can help you track the actions of your visitors when they browse your site in real-time. It is a free, easy-to-use and comprehensive tool that gives all the essential information that can help you improve the ranking of your site on SERPs.

It helps you know ‘who visited your site’, ‘when visited your site’, ‘where did they come from’ and ‘how they interacted with your site’s content’. The tool will provide you detailed insights in the form of interactive graphs and statistics to help you understand the ups and downs of your site in terms of SEO ranking or user engagement quite easily.

6. Use robots.txt file correctly

Website owners use robots.txt tool to let Google and other search engines know which pages of your site you want them to index and which parts of your site you don’t.

Most of the times, developers set up the robots.txt file to discourage search engines to index your site during the development process. Well, that’s fine, but it can create a problem when you forget to change the setting.

So make sure you change the settings of robots.txt file, otherwise, search engine crawlers won’t index your site.

7. Share your site on social media platforms

You can allow search spiders to index your site quickly by sharing your site on social media platforms. This can help crawlers to find your site through a link.

You can either create social networking profiles for your new WordPress site or embed a link to the social media, such as Facebook, Google +, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc to boost the online visibility of your site.

8. Cross check meta tags

A meta tag is a code statement in the HTML language that gives additional information about a web page. It plays a crucial role when Google search bot read and index a website.

This means you need to check the relevancy and authenticity of meta tags if you are facing a lot of indexing issues – it can be a crucial factor that can stop Google from indexing your site properly.

9. Create and distribute offsite content

Get more reliable links to your new site by writing and distributing offsite content. You can create quality, informative and engaging blog posts, guest posts, articles and press releases to speed up your search engine optimization efforts.

Apart from creating quality content, make sure you submit them on trusted websites. It will help Google to crawl and index your site easily.

10. Manually Ask Google to crawl your site

If crawling and indexing fails, you can manually ask Google to find and detect the issues in the affected web pages again. This can help you know the actual problem, and also tell Google that these pages are working fine.

All you need to do is to fetch the URLs in question. This appears under Crawl >Fetch as Google. Now, you can submit any page on your domain for the search engine to check the visibility of the site. After fetching a page, It will start appearing in the list at the bottom with a button of ‘Submit to index’. If everything goes well, you can use it to tell Google to see and include pages to their index.

Conclusion

You should make sure that your WordPress site is well indexed by Google as it can boost your search engine campaign, which in turn, increases organic traffic of your site. You can follow the above guidelines to get your site indexed by Google and other search engines.