{"id":3141,"date":"2019-04-08T00:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-04-07T22:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimdo.com/blog\/?p=3141"},"modified":"2022-04-01T15:30:54","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T13:30:54","slug":"how-to-get-google-to-notice-your-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimdo.com/blog\/how-to-get-google-to-notice-your-website\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Get Google to Notice Your Website"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You\u2019ve built a beautiful website, but it\u2019s not showing up on Google yet. This might leave you feeling like a wallflower at a dance, wondering how to get the big search engines to notice you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google handles billions of websites every day. How does it do that…and how can you get a little more attention? Let\u2019s take a look at how Google indexes, analyzes and then ranks a website, and what you can do to help the process along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1. Indexing your website<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Just like phonebooks in the old days, search engines have a large index of all the pages on all the websites that they know. Your site can only show up in SERPs (the acronym for “search engine results pages”) if it is in that database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does indexing work?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

To find new websites, search engines use crawlers<\/strong>: virtual bots that automatically visit websites. All day, every day. Crawlers look each website up and down: they look at the text, image descriptions, and all the links on the site. At this point, they just want to know what’s there so they can analyze it later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to get your website into Google’s index<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Before your site can appear in the search results, the search engine must know it exists. In technical terms, we want the search engine to add your site to its index of known websites. That\u2019s the first thing to work on: anything you do to optimize your site can only make a difference if the search engine sees your site in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If your site is new, search engine crawlers will find it eventually, likely in a few days or weeks. But if you\u2019d like to hurry the process along, the best way to get it indexed quickly is to sign up for a free Google Search Console account and use its <\/span>URL Inspection Tool<\/span><\/a>.  Or, if you have a Jimdo Dolphin website, you can <\/span>use the SEO tools to automatically submit it for indexing<\/span><\/a>. This process only takes a moment, but you can be absolutely sure that a crawler will visit your website ASAP. Much better than sitting around waiting for something to magically happen.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has your site already been indexed?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The fastest way to see if your site has been indexed is to open up Google and type into the search bar: <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

site:your website address (<\/span><\/i>For example, <\/span>site:my-sample-website.com)<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"How
A quick check will tell you if Google knows your website exists yet. If it doesn’t, don’t worry\u2014it will soon.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hit enter, and the results page will show you a list of all pages on your website that are in Google\u2019s index. If you haven’t been indexed, it’ll say “Your search – site:my-sample-website.com<\/em> – did not match any documents.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Analyzing your website<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once the crawler knows your site exists and what\u2019s on it, it\u2019s time to analyze what it finds. That analysis ends in a ranking: a list of pages on the internet that best match a certain search phrase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What questions does your site answer?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There are many things Google looks at when analyzing a website. The search engine wants to know what your site is about, and more importantly when it should show your website to people searching. The search engine tries to find out which search phrases your website is a good match for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a little bit of subtlety to this process that Google\u2019s algorithms have gotten better and better at figuring out over the years. For example, if your site is about coffee, should it show up when people look for the best place to drink coffee in your city or should it show up when people look for a good coffee supplier for their own cafe? Search engine algorithms can look at your content, “read” your text and answer that question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Ranking your website<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once the search engine has done its analysis, it then wants to figure out if your site is more or less relevant for those search phrases than other competing websites. To do that, it uses around 150 different ranking factors<\/a> (and some say there are even more). Some of those have more importance than others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, there isn\u2019t an easy list to follow of all the different ranking factors. Google and other search engine don\u2019t tell us exactly what they look for because they don\u2019t want us to start manipulating the search results. Luckily, they do offer general guidelines. People who work in SEO often do tests as well, to see how search engines handle content on a website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using this information, you can optimize your site and rank higher for certain search phrases. While there is an entire profession just dedicated to all the nuances of search engine optimization, you can start with these simple steps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n