Google Search is the most popular search engine in the world, with more than three billion users. As many as 90% of Internet users in developed countries use Google to search for information, websites, and products.
Given all this, it’s no wonder why business owners scramble to get their website listed on Google so that their site appears first in search results when someone searches for their services or products. Unfortunately, getting your website listed on Google isn’t exactly that easy.
There are several things you need to consider before submitting your website to Google. In this blog post, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about submitting your website to Google – pros and cons, tips, tricks, and strategies – so that you can make an informed decision before taking action.
What is Google Webmaster (Google Central)?
Google Webmaster is a platform where website owners can go to report issues related to their website, get help fixing those issues, and learn about best practices for optimizing their site for search engines. If you submit your website to Google Webmaster, you’ll be able to see your website’s health, get tips on how to improve it, and see if there are any issues that need to be fixed quickly.
Google Webmaster Tools isn’t the only way to submit your website to Google to be listed in search results. You can also submit your website via Google Search Console. While Google Webmaster Tools is focused on overall website health, Google Search Console focuses almost exclusively on SEO. This is why we’ll be focusing on Google Search Console in this blog post.
Do I Need to Submit My Web site to Google?
The sad truth is that not all websites are found by Google. Some websites might be there, but you just can’t find them easily. To remedy this situation, Google allows website owners to submit their sites for indexing. You can do this by either filling out the form on Google Search Console or by adding a robots.txt file.
The latter is not recommended, however. This is because robots.txt is used to stop Google from crawling your site and indexing it. With Google Search Console, you can submit your site and notify Google of changes you’ve made.
This will ensure Google indexes your site properly and displays it in the search results as soon as possible. And if you’re worried about duplicate content, you can use different URLs for different versions of your sitemap.
The more traffic your website gets from Google search results, the better your SEO performance will be. But not all websites are created equal when it comes to visibility on Google. Some websites have more indexed pages than others. Some have more in-depth content than others. Some are only found through a website’s About Us section, while others can be found on their Contact Us page or another more accessible location.
All of these factors serve as a filter to determine which websites get indexed by Google and which ones don’t. So, do you need to submit your website to Google? In other words, does your website need an additional layer of optimization? If you answered yes to either question, read on to find out why and how you can optimize your website for even greater search visibility with the help of this article!
What is a sitemap, and how does it help with SEO?
A sitemap is a web page that tells Google and other search engines what content is on your website. If your website is large and full of content, it’s easy for crawlers to get lost.
So, sitemaps help search engines like Google know which pages to index and where to find content that isn’t linked anywhere on your site. If you notice your website’s traffic isn’t as high as it could be, you may want to check to see if you have a sitemap.
If you don’t, it may be a signal to Google that your site isn’t as active as it should be. This could lead to your website dropping in the search engine results or even being removed from the search engine entirely.
How to submit your website to Google: The easy way
Luckily, you can submit your website to Google without having to code anything. To do so, go to Google Search Console and select Settings.
Then, select the option to submit your website to Google. There, you’ll find a form to fill out. Basically, you just need to enter your website’s address, a sitemap URL, and a robots.txt URL.
Once you’ve submitted your website, you’ll need to check back periodically to see if any issues have popped up. To do so, select the option to view issues on Google Search Console. There, you can see if your site has been indexed and when it’s expected to be indexed.
How to submit your website to Google: The manual way
If you want to do things the old-school way, you can still submit your website to Google manually. To do so, create a file named “robots.txt” and save it to the root directory of your server.
Next, open the file in a text editor and enter “Sitemap: your-sitemap-URL” into the first line. There are also other guidelines you should keep in mind when submitting your website to Google manually.
For example, use characters only on a standard ASCII keyboard and avoid symbols other users won’t be able to understand. You may also want to avoid using characters that have special meaning, like tabs, newlines, carriage returns, and others.
The Benefits of Submitting My Sitemap to Google
In order to get any real benefits from a sitemap, you need to submit it to Google. It’s possible that a Google crawler will find your sitemap without you doing anything, but they may not index it if they don’t know it exists. The moment you submit your sitemap to Google, you can expect several benefits.
First, it simply makes it easier for Google to find and crawl your website. That’s helpful because your website can’t be found if it isn’t indexed by Google.
However, submitting your sitemap to Google also allows Google to get a better idea of how your website is structured. That can help not only with crawling but also with ranking, as Google can use it to further understand your website’s content and its relatedness to other websites.
It Helps Google Crawl Your Website
As we mentioned above, a sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. It provides the full URL of each page, as well as information about what’s on each page, such as the title and a short description. When Google crawls your website, they collect that information.
They take the sitemap and use it to create a full list of all your pages. That makes it easier for them to crawl your website and index your content, ensuring that it shows up in search results.
It’s especially important to submit your sitemap to Google as soon as you create it. That way, Google can start crawling your website and collecting data as soon as possible.
And since Google crawls and indexes millions of websites every day, you want your website to be one of the first that they crawl so that it shows up in search results as quickly as possible.
It Helps Google Understand the Structure of Your Site
When you submit your sitemap to Google, you’re also telling them which pages are the most important on your site. That’s because you have to rank all of your pages in the sitemap to make it useful. You need to tell Google which pages are most important, which ones are next in line and which ones aren’t as important.
The primary reason you have to rank your pages is so that Google knows which pages to index first. If they didn’t rank your pages in some order, they’d simply have to choose, which is inefficient and leads to mistakes.
But the other reason you need to rank the pages in your sitemap is so that Google can understand their importance. They use that information to better understand the structure of your website so that they can better understand the content of your website as well.
You Can Include Keywords in the Sitemap
Another advantage of submitting your sitemap to Google is that you can include keywords in the sitemap itself. That’s not something Google wants in your actual content, but it’s a useful way of getting those keywords into their crawler.
In fact, one study found that submitting a sitemap with keywords in it can increase the number of visitors coming to your website by 40% within six months. Since those visitors will be directed to the most important pages on your site, they’ll be more likely to stay on your site and click through to your advertisements or links.
That’s why it’s important to include keywords in your sitemap, but only keywords that are relevant to your site. You don’t want to stuff your sitemap full of keywords, as that’s deceptive and will only get you on Google’s bad side. But you do want to put in a few terms that are very relevant to your site.
You Can Specify Which Pages Should Be Indexed
Another advantage of submitting your sitemap to Google is that you can specify which pages you want them to index. If you have a page that you want to be discovered and linked to, but you don’t want Google to index the rest of your website, then you can simply leave it out of your sitemap.
That way, Google knows to index the pages you want them to index while skipping the ones you don’t want them to see. That’s helpful if you have a page that you know is broken, but you don’t have time to fix it yet. You can leave it out of the sitemap so that it doesn’t show up in search results but neither does it get a penalty. That also has implications for ranking.
If you leave certain pages out of the sitemap, that indicates that they’re less important than the others. That’s important because Google uses the content on your sitemap to help determine how your website should be ranked.
You Can Determine Which Domains Are Caused to be Crawled
Another advantage of submitting your sitemap to Google is that you can specify which domains are allowed to crawl your sitemap. If you’re working on a website for an organization and don’t want them to discover your website, then you can simply leave out their domain in the sitemap.
That way, Google will only crawl your domain, not the domain of the organization that owns the website you’re building for them. That can be helpful if you’re on a tight deadline and don’t have time to worry about other sites linking to your work. That’s especially important if you’re working on a website for a client.
If you don’t want to risk the site receiving a penalty or not being discovered by Google, then you can simply leave out their domain in the sitemap. That indicates to Google that they don’t have permission to crawl the site, so they won’t.
Conclusion
If your website isn’t showing up in Google search results, it may be due to one of the reasons mentioned above. To remedy this, you need to submit your website to Google. You can do this by either filling out the form on Google Search Console or by adding a robots.txt file.
The latter is not recommended, however. This is because robots.txt is used to stop Google from crawling your site and indexing it. With Google Search Console, you can submit your site and notify Google of changes you’ve made.
This will ensure Google indexes your site properly and displays it in the search results as soon as possible. And if you’re worried about duplicate content, you can use different URLs for different versions of your sitemap.
