S3 Blog

So you have developed your new website and want to get Google to index it so that you can start getting plenty of traffic, but do you know where to start? It is not as easy as just creating a site and waiting for visitors to find you through a search engine – that search engine needs to know your site exists in the first place. Here are the top 10 ways to make sure Google knows your site exists:-

1. Make sure you have a robot.txt file – this is the file that web spiders use to crawl your site. You need this to allow Google access to your site so that it can index it correctly, you are also able to set access to certain areas of the site so that any administration carried out on a particular page will not mess up your indexing. Keep your robots.txt file clean and it will work for you.

2. Look at your PageRank – this is where your site is when someone performs a search on one of your keywords. To make sure Google notices your site format tags correctly and make sure that your keyword density is just right.

3. Have a sitemap file – this is a formatted file that contains a XML extension which contains all of the URLs for the various pages on your site. If you are unsure of how to do this there are plenty of online tools that can help you to do this.

4. Upload your sitemap to your site’s root directory – this will help Google’s spiders to crawl your website with ease.

5. Add your site to Google’s sitemap page – this is a straightforward task and when you begin the process you will have to follow instructions so that you do not miss anything.

6. Do the above every time you make a change to your site – otherwise Google will not recognise the new pages.

7. Link your site to other sites – this will further help Google to index your site.

8. Make sure that you have a Google account, sitemap generator and sitemap file – make yourself a checklist and check them off once you have them, that way you will not miss out a single step.

9. Do not have broken links – broken links are a no-no in the world of the internet and Google will identify these and your PageRank will suffer, so check links periodically to make sure that they are all working.

10. Have unique content – having fresh and unique content will make your site much more attractive to Google so do not be tempted to plagiarise any material from other sites. Google does not look upon this favourable and if you continue to put duplicate content on your site your PageRank will suffer. If it carries on you might find that you are no longer on Google’s index so pay close attention to what you put on your site and make sure that it is original and not copied from elsewhere.