Are you looking for ways to get your web pages indexed in Google? You probably already know that having a website is essential to being found online. But visibility doesn’t stop there! Having your pages appear in searches can often be the difference between success and failure. That's why it's important to learn how to get your website indexed by Google.

Transcript:

In the latest episode of Hack My Growth, we're going to be looking at indexing, what it is, and why it's important to anybody looking to have their content ranked within the search engines. Today we're talking about indexing and more specifically how you can get your website indexed by Google.

Why Does My Site Need To Be Indexed?

Well, Google has spiders or crawlers, and they're constantly looking for information. Why do I need to put any extra work into helping them? Won't Google just find my site anyways eventually by crawling the internet? Well, the fact is they might, but they might not.

See, if your site's relatively new or it doesn't get crawled often, it could be days, weeks, or even longer before your new content gets indexed. If you're putting a lot of time and emphasis into SEO and content, this could really slow down your efforts and possibly negate them altogether. Indexing is absolutely critical when it comes to your SEO efforts.

What Is the Google Index?

There are a number of indexes. Every search engine has its own, and Google is by far the largest at this moment. The Google Index is a database of all websites that have been crawled and stored by Google for use in the search results. Every page that appears in the Google search results must first be indexed. If your page is not indexed, it will not show up in the search results.

Let's look at the process. This is an oversimplification but it should give you a good idea.

It All Starts With Crawling

The Google bot will go and look for web pages or updated webpage content. Once these pages have been found, they then analyze those pages and store them in a database known as the Google Index.

This index is used to provide relevant search results when someone performs a specific query within the search engines. The more comprehensive and up-to-date the index is, the better quality of results for the users when they're making a query on Google search. We've got to make sure that our sites can be found, and the content can be analyzed and stored so that they can be used in the revealing process, or when somebody makes a query.

How Do I Get My Site Indexed in the First Place?

Well, the first step is to make sure your site is indexable. I've seen it a number of times where a client, new client, or potential client has come to us and they say, "Man, we just got our website rebuilt. It seems like we can't find it. Our content's not showing up anywhere." The first thing I do is look at the site and see if the NoIndex tags are on the site.

Typically, they're put in there during a development process so that you're not indexing sites while you're building them. What happens is a lot of people leave these on and then they wonder why their site can't be found. Well, it's because they're telling Google, "do not index my site." The first step is making sure that your site and content is indexable and readable.

Set Up Google Search Console

Then you need to set up Search Console. We've got a whole video on How To Properly Set Up Search Console. We'll show you how to do things like adding site maps and really making sure that Google can read your content.

You also need to add internal links to your content so it makes it easier when the Google bot comes to your site to find new content.

Then, if they're just not finding the content, you can go and submit those URLs within Search Console. Again, check out our video on Google Search Console and how you can use it. It will walk you through that process, and it's pretty straightforward.

Make sure your site's indexable. Make sure you've got site maps and Google Search Console. Make sure you're adding internal links to your content. If necessary, submit your URLs directly to Google, which is done inside of Search Console.

How Long Does It Take for Google To Index My Site?

How long does it take? Once you've put this content out there, how long does it take for them to index it? Well, John Mueller (who works for Google) said it could take anywhere from several hours to several weeks. It just depends on the site,  how much crawl budget you have, and how fast Google is coming to your site and re-indexing content.

Now, there was research done that showed about 83% of pages are indexed within the first week of publication, but it can take up to eight weeks or longer to get indexed. This is something you need to pay attention to, especially if you're creating a lot of content. Make sure that Google's picking it up.

Why does it take longer for some rather than others? Well, Google's massive. It's made of billions of web pages. It has over a hundred million gigabytes of memory. Google doesn't limit the pages that a website can have indexed, but it will ignore some pages that they don't find to be as helpful. It's a very complex process and database, and so there's a lot that goes into it.

If you want to appear in the search results, it's important that you do two things.

1. Optimize your website - Use on-page best practices to make sure you have a good technical SEO setup. Make sure that you have your site maps.

2. Submit your URLs directly to Google - they will be added more quickly than if you just kind of let Google do the process on their own.

Crawl Demand and Crawl Budget

Two other things that can make it take a little bit longer are crawl demand and crawl budget, and we're going to talk about those really quickly. Crawl demand and crawl budget are the two important concepts that we have to consider when optimizing our website.

Crawl demand is the frequency with which Google re-crawls your website in order to discover new content.

The higher the crawl demand, the more often Google bots will come to your website. These are typically sites like news websites that publish frequently and they need to be crawled often because they have up-to-date information. It's stuff that's kind of happening now, live in real-time.

Lower crawled sites may be sites that are around topics that just don't change very often. These are maybe pieces of content or sites that cover things that just aren't seeing as much renewed or new action. Understanding where your site fits in this process can give you a better idea of how often Google's going to come back to your website.

Crawl budget is the amount of time and resources that a Google bot spends on your website and it's another factor when it comes to SEO optimization. If your website is limited by resources, it's pretty difficult to get deeper and you're not using a good internal link structure, it can drastically dampen your crawl budget because Google's not going to work harder than they have to.

Yes, they're bots, but they have bots with parameters and they have different rules. If your site is hard to access and find new content on, they're just not going to waste their time on your site. They're going to move to a site that's easier to crawl because it takes fewer resources and it's a lot more efficient.

If you can understand crawl demand and crawl budget, you can make your site more technically efficient, have a better internal linking structure, and allow Google bots to have an easier time finding all the pages on your site. That can really help improve the indexability of your site as a whole.

Is There A Guarantee That Your Page Will Be Indexed?

If I do all these things, am I guaranteed to be indexed? The reality is no. Oftentimes Google will just say, "Oh, we know about this page, but we're not indexing it because we don't think that it's really worth indexing."

Reasons That You Might Not Be Indexing

• Check Your Robots.txt File - Are you limiting indexing in certain parts of your site there?
• NoIndex - Do you have NoIndex tags on certain pages?
• Did Google find a piece of content that was canonical? They're saying, "Well, this piece of content is probably the best piece of content in our eyes on your website as opposed to what you think."
• You could have poor link quality, poor content, or poor overall site quality. All three of those can have a massive impact on how your site is being indexed and seen by Google.

Those are things that play a huge role. Again, following best practices. It's important that you take time to do the little things well so that your content and your pages can show up the way you intend them to.

Leverage Structured Data

Another thing that you can do is leverage structured data. Structured data helps set the context of the content. It helps to add more structure to your site in a way that search engines can better understand it. One of the many benefits of structured data is improved indexing because you're able to improve the way you structured your content.

We've got a course that walks you through exactly how to do that using JSON-LD. It walks you through some of the basic types of structured data that are available, and basic types of rich features that you can earn. It walks you through how to create your own JSON-LD and structured data, so that you can add the different features you need to help improve the readability and indexability of your sites for the crawlers.

If you're interested in taking that, go ahead and sign up at learn.simplifiedsearch.net. Use the code YouTube to get 25% off.

Thanks a lot for watching, and if you got any questions, please comment below. We'd love to continue that conversation with you. Until next time, happy marketing.