You want your website to rank as high as possible in search engines such as Google. However, to achieve this goal, it’s essential that Google indexes your site.
But what exactly does it mean for Google to index your site, and how can you check that it has been indexed? Here’s what you need to know about website indexing and how to check on your indexing status.
What Is Web Indexing and Why It Matters
Every search engine has an index. An index helps the search engine organize websites by looking for specific keywords and data on the site. This information lets the search engine know what your site is about so it can determine how to rank your website in search results.
It’s not possible to index your own site—the search engine must do it for you. Web indexing is typically one of the first things that needs to happen for you to begin boosting your rankings and getting more traffic to your website.
Website indexing helps Google understand what your website is about and even what each page on the site is about. Through indexing, Google categorizes your site and each page according to topic. When people search for this topic, your site shows up in the search engine results pages.
When you see search engine results, you’re essentially looking at that search engine’s index of websites and web pages.
How to Check If Google Has Indexed Your Website
It’s simple to check if Google has indexed your website. All you need to do is:
- Go to the Google Search console (make sure you are logged in as the site owner)
- Click on Settings in the bottom right-hand corner
- You’ll be able to see the crawl report of your site there
Keep in mind that Google can take weeks or months to index a new site. The speed of the process depends on your keywords, how many pages your site has, and how much content each page has. So if you have a new website, the crawl report may not be visible just yet.
Things You Can Do to Help Google Index Your Site
There are a few things you can do to make it easier for Google to index your site and help increase your rankings.
Your website should have keywords relevant to your industry, products, or services strategically placed in the content. In addition, it’s essential that your website is easy to navigate. If the web design is too complicated or difficult for people to use, it will not only take longer to index the site, but you may also not see the rankings you want.
Having internal links—links on your site that link to another page on your site—are helpful. However, you’ll also want to remove or replace any broken links, such as those that lead to pages that can’t be found.
Having Issues With Web Indexing?
Are you not getting the SEO results you’d like from indexing? Gazz Consulting can help you determine what’s holding your website back from proper visibility in search engines such as Google. Contact us today to learn more.
