How to Make Sure Google Indexes Your WordPress Website | EP 684

How to Make Sure Google Indexes Your WordPress Website

1. Step One: Create a sitemap (Yoast, etc) 01:34
2. https://wordStep Two: Submit Sitemap(s) via Google Search Consolepress.org/plugins/wp-2fa/  03:14

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of wp the podcast i’m David Blackmon

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:38  David Blackmon: Today in episode 684 we’re going to talk about, how to make sure google indexes your WordPress website. This is insanely important. Most people think “hey i bought a domain, i got a host, now the world’s gonna flock to your website”, and guess what? It just doesn’t happen like that. There are so many things that go into getting your website found. We’re not going to cover all those today, however we are going to cover what it takes initially to get your site indexed on the search engines. Tim you want to give us a you want to start?

01:34 Tim Strifler:  Yeah absolutely. So uh i i will say that google is really good at finding sites and indexing. So chances are if you do not do these steps, eventually google will find your site and index it and stuff,  but why do you want to wait There’s no reason not to do these things, it’s super easy. The first one is you want to create a site map. A site map is a basically it’s a list of all the the pages on your site, and so um you can use Yoast. If you’re using the Yoast SEO Plugin um and i could be wrong, but i think WordPress actually now automatically generates a sitemap for you built into WordPress core. So you might not need to to use it in a SEO plug-in, but since i’m already using Yoast i just use the sitemap that it generates. And so it’s really handy and so basically if you have different parts to your site like custom post types and stuff it it’ll use multiple,  it’ll create multiple site maps. So it’ll have a page site map it’ll have a post site map it’ll have a custom post type sitemap. So if you have like a recipe site all your recipes will be on on a sitemap um and then David’s gonna tell you what you do once you have that site map.

02:26 David Blackmon: I am, wow okay..  uh i’m just kidding. Yeah once you get your sitemap created um you’re gonna want to submit this to search console super easy. Create an account with google search console if you’re not already using gmail g suites as your your email account for your website if you’re not we highly recommend going that route, as opposed to hosting or having an email account with your hosting provider. Because it just ties all of your google stuff together analytics console the whole nine yards so simply go over to google search console and submit the sitemap. And guess what that’s it you’re done yeah pretty easy straightforward nothing to it. Now like we said there’s a ton more that goes into getting your site ranked as opposed to just indexed if you can imagine there are billions of websites in the world and getting found in those billions of websites. There are some things that you have to do but this is an important step and it’s step one and like Tim said you don’t necessarily have to do it google will still find you um however why would you want to wait so yeah.

03:52 Tim Strifler:  Yeah and then even beyond like ranking for keywords it still takes some time for google to start showing your website. Like so say you say you google your exact domain, right well you should be the top one up there right if you’re googling your domain but it can take a little bit of time. And that’s by design google wants to make sure is this a real site, is this are they sticking around before we start showing them in the search engines and directing traffic their way. And so people think that like oh you submit your site map like all of a sudden you’re going to start getting a ton of traffic from google. It’s not that easy as David mentioned. Ranking for keywords is hard but just it takes just a little bit of time as well. Even aside from all the competitiveness of ranking for popular keywords and stuff like that, google is gonna they’re gonna take their time that’s the bottom line.

04:50 David Blackmon: Yeah tomorrow we’ve got another great topic, how to add google analytics to your website which is another very important google product. So come and listen, check us out watch it on YouTube, if you’re listening to this podcast on Spotify or Apple, or any of the places. Tim and i have now started publishing our you know video side of this as well, so if you want to see our beautiful faces come leave us a comment over there and see how we record this podcast as we’re doing it. Come on over and subscribe to our channel, like it you know, hit the algorithm so we can get found found by more WordPress users and stuff. So anyways, Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

05:23  Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye