Most of our visitors asked us how to get their WordPress site listed on Google. Being the largest search engine in the world, Google is good enough to automatically detect and index new websites. However, this can sometimes not be listed immediately on your website. Since Google is the biggest traffic source for most websites, it is important that you get website listed in Google immediately. In this article, we will show how to get your WordPress site listed on Google.
Why should you get your WordPress site listed on Google?
Google is the top place of traffic and visitors to most websites. If you are serious about launching a blog or starting your new business website, then it is important to get your website listed on Google as soon as possible. See our step by step guide on how to Control Search Rankings This Year.
Start to Listing Your WordPress Site on Google
Before you start, you will need to create a Google Webmaster Tools account (Google Search Console). You can easily set it up by following the instructions on how to add your WordPress site to Google Wordmaster Tools.
1. Check WordPress Settings for Search Engine Visibility
After setting up your Webmaster Tools account, you will need to make sure that your WordPress site appears on the search engine. You can see it under Settings » reading page and scrolling to the Search Engine Visibility option.
Make sure to remove the check mark from Search Engine Visibility option, so search engines can crawl your website.
2: Installing Yoast SEO Plugin
The next thing you need to do is install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin. Go SEO tab and click on it to see the plugin’s settings page.
On the settings page, you can see the Webmaster Tools tab. You will use it to connect Google Search Console to our WordPress site.
3: Connecting Google Search Console with WordPress
After you’ve installed Yoast SEO plugin, you need to add your website to Google Search Console. You can do this by clicking the Add Property button in your Google Search Console account.
In the Website field, you need to add the full website URL. It is important that you use the same URL that you are looking at in your browser’s URL bar, which includes WWW or non-www as well as HTTPS.
After you add the website URL, it will take you to the verification page, where you need to verify the owner of this website. You can use several methods to verify ownership. The simplest and easiest way is under the Alternative methods tab called “HTML tags”. This will give you a meta code that you need to copy.
Go to your WordPress Admin Area and click under SEO » General tab. In the Webmaster Tools tab, you need to paste the code into the Google verification code field and click on Save Changes button.
Go back to the Google Search Console account and click the Verify button. Your website ownership will be verified successfully.
4: Add XML Sitemaps
You have to go to the SEO » General tab in the WordPress Admin Area and click on the FEATURES tab. After this, you need to scroll to the XML Sitemap option and turn it on.
After click on Save Changes you can go to on the question mark icon next to XML sitemaps title. It will show the link that you can follow to see all your XML sitemaps.
Finally you need to submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools account.
You will have to go to Crawl » Sitemap on the left side of the screen. After this, you have to click the Add / Test Sitemap button on your screen and add your Sitemap URL.
Your main sitemap file name is sitemap_index.xml, and it contains links to all other Sitemaps on your site. All you have to do is submit this main Sitemap link, and Google will automatically crawl all other Sitemaps links from your website.
At the end you can visit your Google search console account to check your website link listings. Once Google has crawled and indexed your website links, you can start looking reports in search console.
Slow website affects search rankings. See our article on htaccess file help to optimize your website for improve ranking.
I hope this article helped you get your WordPress site listed on Google.
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