For those of you making a website on your own, indexing and reindexing your site is a step that can be easily forgotten. After all, you have a domain to register, business emails to set up, and ads to promote. Yet it’s important to get this step done ASAP— or else your site may not be easily discoverable with a simple Google Search!
Now, you can take the laissez-faire approach and let Google eventually boost your website to the top without doing anything extra. When you take this approach, you focus on producing digital content on top of content for your business. However, you could still be losing out on visits to your site until it grows to the point the Google bots (AI technology) recognize it as a formidable force and list it at the top of everyone’s search results. When Google bots scour the internet, they prioritize connections they built through references. Without any references or a sitemap, your site or your post will be harder to be discovered.
For the more action-forward approach, tell Google about your site. You can submit your URLs and sitemap to Google Search Console. You can then take it a step further and submit the sub-URLs to various subpages of your site that you would also like to be listed when people search your business. The process can take anywhere from a few hours to 6 months for Google to fully crawl and index your site. That’s a very long time, so you want to get as much in Google’s system as soon as possible. The index and reindex request runs on a queue and no matter how many times you submit it, your place in the virtual line won’t change.
Even so, submitting a sitemap can help the Google Bots make more connections and list your site higher sooner. You can submit the file in TXT or XML format, though we at EAZ Creative suggest the XML format. TXT files are very simple, listing plain links on the site. XML files go more in-depth, providing information on connections between URLs of pages and places in your site. Since XML files go more in-depth, they also include image file links. So make sure all your images have alt-text so that they are discoverable as well.
Connections are the primary means Google Bots know to list your site. So the more times your site is referenced and the more references your site holds, the higher your site will be listed. News articles, blogs, social media— they all count as references. References include links to various pages on your site that you list on social media. So when you post about your business on a site like Facebook or LinkedIn, not only should the page already link to your main website but when you should also link the relevant page when you post about a service you offer or a recent addition to your site. It also includes other sites or articles publishing about your business since it causes your business and therefore website to be searched more.
A quick note: Since Google isn’t the only search engine, it can also be helpful to submit your URL and all its variations to other search engines. These include search engines like Bing or Yahoo. Just like Google, fully crawling and indexing the site can take some time.
Indexing and reindexing your site boosts your site to the top of everyone’s search results without charging you a pretty penny. We hope this article has provided better insight into some of the components it takes to boost your online presence. If you’re interested in more ways to improve your SEO, contact EAZ Creative today to see how we can elevate your business.