How To Get My Website On Google In 7 Simple Steps

Today, Google handles nearly 3.8 million queries every minute or 228 million queries per hour. This is a huge opportunity for everyone and because of that, you need to get your website on Google as soon as possible.

In this blog post, I’ll show you:

• How to check on On-Page SEO?
• How to add and verify a website in Google Search Console (ex. Webmaster Tools)?
• How to use structured data?
• How to send a crawler immediately?
• How to start building backlinks?
• Basically, I’ll tell you everything you need to know to get your site on Google.

How Google Works?

When you enter a specific query into the search box, you don’t search the entire Internet - you search Google’s index of the web. Indexing the web is simple. Google has built a software called spider that goes from page to page, and index it in its database. We’re talking about billions of pages here.

Google has data centers all around the world.

This is how one of their many data centers looks.

A multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion pages a day which is an enormous number.

At the beginning in 1999, they were able to index about 50 pages a day in ONE month. Today, it’s happening in less than a minute. Impressive.

There are nearly 200 Google ranking factors, divided into two groups:

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is about everything that’s in your hands, such as title, description, URL structure, content, internal links, etc. Basically, everything you can change by yourself.

On the other side, Off-Page SEO factors are something that’s a bit harder to influence on, including: Backlinks Bounce rate Social media etc.

#1 On-Page SEO: Basic Requirements

There are too many On-Page SEO factors that can influence in getting your site on Google, so I’ll explain only a few.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file is a small textual document telling which pages you don’t want being accessed by search crawlers.

Search crawlers always look at robots.txt for crawling instructions. For instance, you might be interested in ignoring your internal search result pages, or certain file types like PDF documents.

The first step is to check a robots.txt document because something like this: User-agent: * Disallow: / will block all crawlers from all content.

Next, you can use a robots.txt file to send the path to your sitemap. Here is the example. Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Anyway, you can always use Google Search Console, former Webmaster Tools, for sending the path (I’ll talk about that later).

Internal Links

As I mentioned earlier, crawler goes from page to page and index it into Google’s database.

But, if you don’t link your internal pages crawler won’t be able to index your website. For that reasons, you need to create good internal links.

To see your internal linking structure, you can use Google Search Console. In the menu, click on Search Console - Internal Links

After that, you’ll see something like this.

Simply said, you can find which pages are internal linked and which aren’t. Note that internal links help in increasing your Google rankings (not only in being indexed).

All in all, adding few internal links will definitely help Google to find you easier and crawl the specific page.

WHOIS Information

Did you know that information about domain owner is publicly available unless you buy domain privacy? Domain privacy masks your personal information in WHOIS record.

But it’s also a sign to Google that for some reasons you’re protecting your identity and you might be seen as a spammer.

On the photo above, you can see WHOIS information for facebook.com. In other words, leave it public.

Until recently, Google was a domain registrar that haven’t been registering domains for other companies.

The reason why they wanted to be ICANN accredited registrar is actually having the full WHOIS access. Again, don’t buy domain privacy, it’s a signal that you might be a spammer!

#2 Add Your Website In Google Search Console

I've already mentioned Google Search Console (ex. Google Webmaster Tools) and now let’s see how to add and verify your own website.

The first step is to open the app and click on ADD A PROPERTY button.

As expected, you need to enter your URL and click on Add. Please keep in mind that:

• https://jellymetrics.com, and
• https://www.jellymetrics.com

are two different properties in Google Search Console. For example, if I enter the second one (www version), I will be forced to enter that page, too.

There are different ways of verifying the ownership. The easiest one is to connect your Google Tag Manager app with Google Search Console, which takes you a three seconds to verify.

Anyway, there are alternative methods like uploading a unique HTML file (that will Google access to it), adding unique HTML meta tag to your site's home page, or connecting your domain name provider, as well.

For example, if I pick HTML tag option, my job will be to copy the meta tag and paste it into my home page.

In other words, if you’re just a marketer without coding skills, you need to call your developer which can delay the verification process.

For that reason, the best thing is to install Google Tag Manager once, so you can later add HTML codes without calling for help.

As for me, I’ve chosen the first option to verify my domain.

Here you can see two different properties (www and non-www versions) that I was talking about.

#3 Add Structured Data

Structured data helps Google to understand the content on your site. Sometimes, Google uses those data to display rich snippets in SERP.

The best examples are recipes.

Structured data tells Google about:

• Minutes needed to make the pizza
• How many calories your recipe has
• How many reviews are on your page
• What is the user’s rating of the specific recipe

In short, it helps Google a lot to learn about your content. Google is still a computer algorithm.

Now, let’s see how to create your own structured data, so it can help Google to better understand your content and in the end to get your website on Google easier.

The first step is to open Schema.org, which is sponsored by Google, Microsoft (Bing), Yahoo and Yandex .

In the menu, click on Schemas page where you can see the full list of available structured data.

For example, if you’re an E-commerce business owner, then you can definitely choose Product type (more than 1,000,000 domains is using Product schema).

In fact, structured data has been the subject of much discussions and many experiments, but there is no evidence it directly improves ranking.

However, it will result in a better CTR which is the important ranking factor.

Now, if you’re selling product on the Internet, you can always use structured data to help Google to understand specific product’s properties such as:

• Brand
• Color of the product
• Manufacturer
• Model
• SKU
• Weight
• Width

Have you ever been wondering how Google knows which products are Adidas blue shoes?

Well, they use machine learning technology to learn more about images, but they use structured data as well.

Furthermore, if you Google for Adidas cheap shoes they won’t show you expensive shoes because it’s definitely easy to understand the price.

Now, let’s open Adidas shoes page and see how they use structured data. For testing, I’ll use Structured Data Testing Tool which is the tool created by Google.

Simply copy the product’s URL, paste into the textbox and click on RUN TEST.

After a few seconds, you’ll see the list of structured data properties.

Here is one review.

Now you know where does review stars in Google search results come from.

Finally, let me show you how to create Structured Data in Google Search Console without any programming. In the menu, click on Search Appearance - Structured Data.

Next, you’ll see if your website has provided structured data.

If yes, great! If not, click on Data Highlighter in the menu which is a new alternative to webmaster markup.

Here is how the process looks:

As you can see from the image above, your job is to select a specific piece of content (product name, SKU, price, color, etc.) and tell Google what it means to be.

So, let’s click on Start Highlighting. The first step is to enter the URL of the typical page on my site. I’ve entered How To Start a Successful Blog URL.

Next, I simply need to select a specific piece of content and choose what it belongs to. In this case, blog post title belongs to Title property.

Publishing blog post date belongs to Date published.

Notice the right part of the page - preview of everything you did.

The next step is creating a page set where you simply choose similar pages that you’d like to extract data from.

This way, you won’t need to repeat yourself because Google will find a pattern and apply it to other pages as well.

After you create page set, you need to tag more examples because Google can make a mistake as well.

I just clicked on Remove Page and that’s it. The reason why this happened is the structure of my URLs. I don’t have URLs as this:

• https://jellymetrics.com/blog/some-name-1/
• https://jellymetrics.com/blog/some-name-2/
• https://jellymetrics.com/blog/some-name-3/

If I had, there won’t be a mistake. My URLs are identical for all pages (product, pricing, contact, blog post, etc).

After removing wrong pages you need to review it once again and click on Publish which leads you to the starting point.

To sum up, add structured data because it helps Google to understand what your page is about and at the end of the day, it helps you getting your page on Google.

#4 Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is something that will definitely help search engines to crawl your website. It’s a way to tell Google about the organization of your site content.

Think about sitemap as a file where all your pages are listed.Here are some typical cases when to create a sitemap:

• Large site
• New site with a few backlinks
• Bad internal links

Here is interesting sentence from Moz guide about different content types: Sitemaps also come in a variety of formats and can highlight many different types of content, including video, images, news, and mobile.

Now, let’s see how to create a sitemap.

Google XML Sitemaps

Absolutely the most installed WordPress plugin for creating sitemaps. With more than 1 million active installs, it is (along with WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache) one of the most popular plugins, generally.

The beautiful part is that (since version 4) sitemap.xml is dynamically generated like any other WordPress content. When you successfully install this plugin, you can configure it by clicking on XML-Sitemap in Settings menu.

 

Next, you’ll see the URL to your sitemap.

As you can see, the plugin has pinged Google and Bing so they are notified about my sitemap.

However, it’s because I clicked on Notify Search Engines about your sitemap, a bit earlier. Scrolling down lets you change frequencies, for example.

In simple terms, you can use this feature to tell Google how often you update different part of the site.

Note that Posts is set as Monthly, which is wrong. Here at Jellymetrics, we publish at least 2 - 3 blog posts per week, so I can set it to Weekly.

There are other options such as:

• Always
• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Never

Anyway, you can set to Hourly but it doesn’t mean Googlebot will visit your site every hour.

It’s just a hint to Google algorithms (which is also useful). Adding in a sitemap in Search Console is also something that you should think about.

Here is how. 

Click on Crawl - Sitemaps and after that, just click on ADD/TEST SITEMAP.

The next step is to enter the URL to your sitemap so you can submit the sitemap.

If you’re still not sure about your sitemap URL, let me remind you that you can find it in Google XML Sitemaps plugin (scroll up and you’ll see).

So, I’ll just enter my sitemap URL and click on Submit.

After that, I can see my sitemap has successfully submitted.

That’s it. After a while, you’ll see that your map has been indexed.

#5 Send a Crawler Manually

Did you know that you can tell to Google: Hey Google, please visit my new blog post, crawl it and send it in the index.

Yes! That’s possible with Google Search Console and here is how. In the menu, go to Crawl - Fetch as Google.

 

Now, let’s imagine that I want to submit my latest blog post in the index. What I will do is to enter the URL and click on FETCH. Here is how it should look like:

Now you can see Submit to index button where you simply tell Google to index your page.

An interesting part is that you can crawl only entered URL or you can crawl entered URL plus its direct links.

Please keep in mind that second option is available only 10 times a month.

#6 Google My Business

How many times you’ve seen this?

Well, this is exactly what we call Google My Business. It’s a great way to get your business hours, phone number, and directions on Google Search and what’s more Google Maps.

Literally, it will improve the presence of you and your company in Google products. Anyway, let’s see how to add your company in 3-steps:

• Tell Google which business is yours.
• Verify your business
• Double check your details

Firstly, you need to find your business on the map (or add it for free).

After that, Google will call you or send you a letter, so you can verify the company. T

he last step is to check all entered information because sometimes people make a typo. So, open the page and click on the START NOW button.

Now, you’ll see a map and a small form where you need to enter your data.

As you can see from the photo, you need to enter:

• Business name
• Country/region
• Street address
• City
• State
• ZIP code
• Main business phone
• Category

If you deliver goods and services to customers at their location After you click on Continue you need to confirm your business.

Click on Continue and that’s it. Follow the instructions and also, keep in mind, that this will create a Google+ Page for the business.

#7 Off-Page SEO: Build Backlinks To Speed Up The Process

Although there are more than 200 Google ranking factors, backlinks are still the most important. Backlinks will help you get indexed as soon as possible, but also it helps in achieving better-ranking positions.

Now, I want to show you how to build backlinks and things you need to think about. Firstly, know that not every backlink has equal quality.

As an example, let me say that getting a backlink from high authority sites like Mashable and The Next Web isn’t same as getting backlink at a blog that showed up recently.

According to Moz, Mashable has a Domain Authority 95 of 100.

DA predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. This metric is based on a logarithmic scale, which means it’s easier to grow your score from 30 to 40 than from 70 to 80.

In fact, most sites will never reach DA of 80. Surely, it’s extremely hard to get backlinks at Huffington Post, Forbes, Mashable, and other similar sites, but you should try to target 45 - 50 DA sites at least.

Anyway, let’s see how to build first backlinks so you can get your website on Google much faster, what requirements need to be solved, and what’s more important, how to rank high in Google.

Creating content (20% efforts)

It’s logical that you need to produce great content if you want to get backlinks. Horrible content won’t bring you any backlinks, at least the ones that matter.

According to Content Marketing Institute, brand awareness, and lead generation are the most important goals for B2B content marketing. 

As for me, lead generation is the most important organization goal of your content marketing.

Please keep in mind that you should be writing +2,000 words articles because they tend to rank higher in Google, according to serpIQ.

I know it’s hard to write +2,000 words articles, but if you want to rank high, that’s what you should do. Just think how many competitors will fail with their blogs because they won’t be patient? Plus it’s a magnet for getting backlinks.

Furthermore, you need to generate a lot of content marketing ideas which shouldn’t be a problem! I wrote a great article so you can generate dozens of ideas within a few minutes.

Here are a few sources of generating content ideas:

• Quora (what other people ask)
• BuzzSumo (what type of content leads a lot of shares)
• Ahrefs (what phrases competitors rank)

As you can see, it’s definitely easy to collect dozens of new ideas. Writing is a bit harder part because it requires tons of research, especially if you’re not so familiar with the topic.

I suggest using Google Docs as a main content writing tool. It’s easy shareable so other colleagues can collaborate and so on.

Promote it (80% efforts)

If you were wondering what does 20% and 80% in these subheading means, here’s the explanation:

• Spend 20% of your time on content creation
• Spend 80% of your time on content promotion

Maybe you’re writing the best content in the world, but if you don’t promote it, you’re going to fail. Here are some social media sites you can use for content distribution.

LinkedIn is great for content promotion because you can join different groups and use them to promote your content.

Here you need to be very careful because they can ban you if you’re sending links to your blog posts. I’d suggest you being an active member of groups you’re interested in.

When you publish great content and promote it, backlinks will come without asking anyone to link you back!

Anyway, if you wish to do link building, you need to reach out potential bloggers that might link you back. For example, you can use broken link building tactic which is very simple:

1. Find pages that are linking to broken URLs.
2. Use a wayback machine to check what it used to be.
3. Create something similar (and better).
4. Outreach potential sites and tell them they’re linking to non-existing pages.

You might be wondering why would someone link you back. Your outreach adds a value and creates their posts better. That’s why.

So, if you want to get your website on Google very fast with building new backlinks, you need to contact a lot of people, but this is something that 100% works.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I’ve shown you a lot of tips and tricks and if you follow everything I’ve mentioned, I can guarantee that your site will appear on Google very fast.

Definitely, the fastest thing is to send a crawler manually, but what is it worth if you don’t have any backlinks? Without backlinks, you can’t rank high, and it doesn’t matter if your site is on 7th or on the 6th page.

Surely, there are a lot of long-tail keywords that’s easy to rank, but still, without links.. It won’t help you so much. Building new links is boring but that’s only in the beginnings. Once your blog gets traction, things will work for you.

I don’t think many successful blogs are outreaching other bloggers - they don’t need to because things are working for them.