With the world going digital today, we all want to make our mark in the digital world.
That is why there are so many new websites and blogs spinning up every day and flooding our feeds.
Every website or blog owner has certain plans to create awareness about his website and in the long run, earn money from it.
But to even create awareness, the first thing that a website owner or a blogger would want is that people should know about it.
The best way to reach out to people is to appear in search engines. That is why companies and blogs give so much importance to SEO nowadays. But even for SEO to work properly, your website has to be indexed by Google first.
Unless Google indexes your website, it won’t be appearing in the search engine.
The main question is, how you can make your website be indexed by Google as fast as possible?
For that, you need to crawl and index your website content and then get the Googlebot to your website or blog and index your content as soon as possible.
Does everything sound like a cluster of thoughts? Let’s simplify it for you.
What is Googlebot, Crawling, and Indexing?
These terms might sound complicated, but they are going to be your need of the hour if you want your website content to be indexed.
The Googlebot is the search bot software that Google uses for collecting information about documents available on the web and add them to Google’s searchable index.
The process through which Googlebot travels from one website to another and then to another, in order to find new and updated information to report back to Google is called crawling.
Through this, the Googlebot finds useful links and reports it back to Google.
Then the Googlebot processes all the information that it finds through crawling and that process is called indexing.
After they are completely processed and have been passed off as quality content, they are then added to the searchable index of Google.
While the Googlebot is indexing, it processes the words on a webpage and finds where those words are located.
All the meta tags, title tags and ALT tags that website contents use are also analyzed during the indexing process.
How Does The Googlebot Index The Web?
The Googlebot is constantly finding new content on the web. It captures the data and content during its previous crawling and then adds that content in the sitemap data that are provided by webmasters.
As the Googlebot browses through the web pages that were previously crawled through, it detects links on those pages and then adds to the list of pages to be crawled.
So now when a user uses Google to search for something, the search algorithm of Google pulls out information from its huge established database that it has collected through the Googlebot, and that is why the user gets the search results so quickly and efficiently in accordance with the search keywords.
The Googlebot is constantly crawling through different websites to gather new information and update the database. Google tries to show you completely new and updated content when you search for something, even though it has relevant data from years ago.
That is why, when a website owner is adding new content to his website, he wants to make sure that his website is indexed as soon as possible otherwise it might go downwards in the search engine.
Why Is It So Important To Get Your Blog Indexed Quickly?
Even though the Googlebot is constantly crawling for new data from one site to another, you still need to get your website or blog indexed. if your website is new or it does not get crawled quite often, then it delays your blog’s search engine visibility.
Needless to say, the search engine visibility factor is the most important aspect of digital marketing.
When your website or blog appears on the search engine it automatically drives more traffic and traffic is boosted in no time. But for this to happen, you need to index your blog or website first.
This indexation on Google directly affects your website rankings, traffic and eventually earning money from your website.
The reason why website owners want their blogs to get indexed quickly is that the sooner they compete for top spots in search engines with proper SEO, the sooner they establish their webpage in a top spot, the sooner they create the buzz about their website.
The digital world is very competitive. Only about 5.7% of all the newly published pages get to make their place in the top ten results on the search engine in one year. Yes, that is how competitive it gets out there.
Now obviously, making a place in the top few rankings on the search engine takes time.
Google has a thing for established websites that have been there for quite some time. But new webpages can still have good rankings, given that they index their content faster and start competing for the game of high rankings.
The Googlebot cannot follow internal links to be able to find new pages. It needs an existing record for a period of around 2-3 years.
Also, if you change your domain name after being an already established site and then transfer all your content to the new domain, Google will consider your new domain name as a completely new website on the block.
So, if you are rebranding your website, you need to get your website indexed as fast as possible and do the same, you have always been doing.
How to Get your New Website Indexed By The Googlebot?
The first step to getting your blog indexed is to let the Googlebot discover your website in the first place. For that to happen, a blog owner can do the following things:
1. Create a sitemap:
A sitemap is nothing but an XML document on your website server that does the job of listing all the pages on your website.
It sends signals to the search engines when you add new pages to your website and also tells search engines about how often they should check back for certain changes you have made on certain web pages.
Like, if you want search engines to come back and check your homepage daily for any new changes or product item or content that you have added, your sitemap does that job.
If your content website or blog is built on WordPress, you can easily install the Google Sitemaps plugin and it will automatically create the sitemap for your blog and update it continuously.
Also, it submits the web pages and its changes to search engines.
2. Submit this sitemap to Google Webmaster tools:
To have a Google Webmaster tool, you need to simply create an account on Google and then sign up for the Webmaster Tools.
After you have created the sitemap for your blog, the first thing you have to do is take it to Google Webmaster Tools.
First, add this new website or blog to Webmaster Tools, then find the ‘Sitemap’ subhead under ‘Optimization’, and then add that link to your website sitemap that you had added to Webmaster Tools if you want to notify Google about it and the already published pages.
3. Do not forget to install Google Analytics:
Installing Google Analytics is basically for tracking and monitoring purposes. You would need it to track the traffic on your website, on each of the stories at any given point of time.
But using Google Analytics also notifies Google about the new websites that have been registered. Then it becomes easier for the Googlebot to crawl your website.
4. Submit your website URL to search engines:
Submitting your website URL to search engines only takes a moment. This gets the search engine’s bot to crawl to your website.
All you need to do is sign into your Google account that is linked with the website, then click on the ‘Submit URL’ option in the Webmaster Tools, and then simply paste the URL there.
Once it is done, the Googlebot then can easily detect your website on the web.
5. Create a new social media profile or update the already existing ones:
By now, you already know that the Googlebot and even other search engine crawlers get to a website via some links.
One way you can make the Googlebot, spot your website faster is to create a social media profile for your website on different platforms, or you can simply add the links of your already existing profiles.
For this, you need to have an account each on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Youtube channel.
More the number of social media profiles your blog has, the easier it becomes for the Googlebot to detect your blog and crawl to it.
6. Share the link of the new website:
Once you have successfully created social media profiles on all platforms, you then need to add the website link to all these profiles.
After that, share this through status updates on each of the social media profiles. These links will alert the search engines bots about the presence of a new website on the web.
For the YouTube channel, you can make a video to introduce the channel and say what it is about, and then add a link in the video’s description box.
7. Do not forget to create offsite content:
When it is all about links that the Googlebot detects and crawls to, you would want to create as many new links as possible, to increase your website’s visibility.
To get some more new links, you can create some offsite content through various means. You can submit some guest posts to your blog, or create a directory for the articles, or even submit press releases to SEO optimization services.
But for this, you have to make sure that the entire offsite content is quality content and not spam. Google rejects spam content.
8. Set up the RSS with the Feed burner
Google’s own RSS management tool is called Feed Burner. To notify Google about your new blog, you need to sign in to your Google account that is linked with the blog and then submit your blog feed to Feed Burner.
You can do that by copying the blog’s URL or the RSS feed URL and paste it on the ‘Burn a feed’ column. This ensures that along with your sitemap, the Feed burner will also notify the Googlebot of your new blog.
Now you know everything that you need to index your website or blog on Google. Once it is indexed, the traffic from search engines to your site will increase.
Not just that, even the new content that is published on your website from time to time will also get more traffic. The sitemap and RSS feed will ensure that the new and updated content gets discovered and indexed faster.
You also need to keep one thing in mind. The Googlebot crawls to and indexes blog pages and blog content on the search engine faster than it does to the normal pages on a website.
So it is advisable to have a blog that is linked to your website and supports the site.
Now if you have a new page on your website where you add details about a new product or website, you should write a blog post about it on the blog related to it. Then link the product page from the website to this blog post.
This will help the Googlebot to discover the page faster and then index it. That will, in turn, increase the traffic to the pages, the blog, and the actual product page.