If you’ve ever been frustrated by how long it takes for your site to appear in Google’s search results, this post is for you. We’ll show you some ways to expedite the process and get your site indexed more quickly. These techniques are simple, easy and don’t require any technical know-how on your part.
What Is Google’s Index?
The index is the list of pages on a website that search engines have crawled and stored. Each page is assigned a unique number, which enables you to find them in the rankings.
When it comes to Google’s index, there are two kinds: web and search engine. The Web index holds all of the content from websites across the Internet (more specifically, all of the content that Google has crawled). The Search Engine index contains only sites that contain links pointing back to your site. So if someone clicks on one of these links and visits your site, that’s how Google knows about it!
Use Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a web-based tool that allows you to view and monitor your site’s performance. It can also be used to help diagnose issues with crawling, indexing and ranking.
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) provides useful data about how your site is doing in the search results with things like link authority, crawl errors, mobile usability and so on. You can use this information to diagnose technical problems as well as improve your SEO strategy.
Submit Your Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that contains all of the pages on your website. Google uses these files to determine what pages exist on your site and how frequently they change, which helps to better understand how to crawl and index your content.
You can submit a sitemap for free by signing up for their Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools).
After submitting your sitemap:
- They’ll begin crawling it within 24–48 hours.
- You may start seeing changes in crawl rate within a week or two of submission if you’ve made recent changes to the site, but this could take longer depending on other factors like crawl budget allocation.*
If you don’t submit a sitemap:
- They will continue crawling at a normal rate, which may not be optimal because they won’t know about all of the content on your site.*
Make Sure That Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Google has made it clear that website responsiveness is a key factor for a site’s success in the search engine rankings. It has updated its algorithms to reward sites that are optimized for mobile devices over those that aren’t, since users are increasingly using smartphones when searching online.
If you want your site to rank highly on Google, you must ensure that it is mobile-friendly and easy to use on any smartphone or tablet device.
Get Listed in Online Directories
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines state that “the more sites that link to you, the higher your site will rank in the search results.”
You can submit your website to free online directories, which will then add a complete or partial listing of your site to their database and provide links back to it. These listings are known as “indexes” on these directory sites, because they allow Googlebot (Google’s web spider) and other search engines access to them so that they can index them in their databases of websites. By getting listed in these directories, you increase the amount of links pointing at your site from other sites in the same industry or niche market as yours.
Eliminate Indexing Roadblocks
- Remove duplicate content. This is a big one, and it’s easy to fix, so let’s get it out of the way first. For example, if you have multiple pages on your site with the exact same information (like an e-commerce site where all products are grouped by category), then Google will only index one page for each URL. This happens because it doesn’t know which page is more relevant to its users and would rather not waste any time figuring that out for itself. With this in mind, make sure that all of your pages are unique—and if possible try to link back from unique pages on other websites so that Google will recognize them as authoritative sources.*
- Remove irrelevant content from your site.* The best way to do this is by creating a sitemap or XML file that describes all of the pages on your website through keywords and categories so that search engines can find them easily when crawling through links posted around the web.* Remove duplicate content across different versions of your website.* In cases where there are two different versions of a website (such as an app versus mobile version), both versions should have separate URLs that use similar content but offer slightly different experiences based on device type or screen size (for instance).
Target Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are more specific than short-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is a term that is more specific and targeted, such as “how to grow blueberries in your backyard” or “blueberry bushes for sale near me.” These are much easier to rank for because they aren’t so competitively saturated. They also tend to have more traffic than short-tail keywords (e.g., “blueberry plants”) because there’s less competition.
Long-tail keywords are popular search terms because people can find what they’re looking for with less wasted time and effort. For example, if you type in “blueberry bushes for sale” then Google will immediately show you related searches like “where can i buy blueberry bushes” and “buy blueberry bush.” If you type in a general search like “plants” then Google will show you unrelated ads on the page instead of relevant results from its index database!
Create a Google My Business Listing
It’s important to create a Google My Business listing because it will help your site get indexed faster by Google. The process is pretty straightforward:
- Go to https://www.google.com/business/.
- Enter information about your business and location in the fields that appear on screen. You can also use pictures from other sources, like Facebook or Instagram, if you don’t have any photos of your own (but make sure they’re appropriate before doing so).
- Click Create and finish creating your listing! Once it’s created, Google will start showing more than just the basic information about your business—it might even show other things people have said about you online or even links related to what you do as well!
Submit Your Site to Similar Sites
- Add your site to directories and search engines
- Submit your site to social media
- Contact other sites like yours, asking them to link to you
Encourage Social Shares of Your Content
Social media sharing is a powerful way to make your content visible to new people. If you have a blog post or page on your website that you want Google to find and index, consider adding social share buttons to the page. This will encourage users to share the content on their own profiles, which can improve its visibility in search results.
There are plugins that make it easy to add social share buttons directly into WordPress posts and pages. Just install one of these plugins (we recommend Shareaholic), activate it, then click “Add Social Media Buttons” from within your post editor. You’ll see a list of all the available options for sharing—choose whichever ones apply for this piece of content and click “Save.” That’s all there is too it!
Conclusion
Overall, it’s a good idea to do everything you can to ensure that your site is found by Google. This includes submitting your sitemap and creating a Google My Business listing, among other things. The more work you put into this process, the faster your site will be indexed—and that means more traffic!
