Index Your WordPress Website In Search Engines
Tags: SEO, Index, WordPress, Guid, Google

Index Your WordPress Website In Search Engines Visualmodo Follow May 4 · 4 min read

When you finally create a new WordPress website, you might be expecting visitors to start coming eagerly. In reality, before people start visiting your site, search engines need to find, index, and rank it. In this article, I share some of the best tips and recommendations to index your new WordPress website in search engines.

Index Your New WordPress Website In Search Engines Faster

Do you want more organic search traffic to your site? I’m willing to bet the answer is yes — we all do! Organic search traffic is critical for growing your website and business. Some research claims around 33% of your site’s traffic can be attributed to organic search. But the stats don’t matter much if your site doesn’t show up in the search results at all.

How do you get your new site or blog indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines? Well, you’ve got two choices. You can take the “tortoise” approach. Just sit back and wait for it to happen naturally, but this can take weeks or months. Trust me, I’ve been there before, not fun. Moreover, you can make it happen now, giving you more time and energy to put towards increasing your conversion rate, improving your social presence. Finally, writing and promoting great and useful content to index your WordPress website.

In a way, we are completely at Google’s mercy when it comes to being found on the web. No index, no organic traffic. However, the good news is that there are plenty of things we can do to move Google into giving us a spot in their SERPs which we will talk about in the following.

Content, content, and content

The thing about being indexed by Google is, we don’t just want them to be aware of our site, but be aware of it in a good way. If your site is empty or worse, full of crappy content, it might get indexed but it won’t get anywhere near the front row of the SERPs. That’s almost as bad as not being indexed at all.

It’s no secret that Google cares about the relevancy and quality of your content. For that reason, when you set up your site, focus on high-quality, useful, original content. Naturally, that also means to stay away from duplicate and/or scraped content.

Disable “Discourage Search Engines” In WordPress

During the development phase, usually, the last thing we want is to be indexed by search engines. In fact, we want to keep Google and Co as far away from our site as possible. Otherwise, incomplete and low-quality content and Google will form an opinion about our site based on that.

One of the most common mistakes is to leave “discourage search engines from indexing this site” active in the back end of WordPress. That’s basically a death sentence for organic traffic on your site. So, in order to make sure you get indexed (or if you are having problems appearing on Google), definitely have a look at this setting at the bottom of Settings > Reading to make sure it is unchecked. Finally, save changes.

Good Hosting Provider To Index Your New WordPress Website In Search Engines

One of the first potential barriers to getting Google to the index is the hardware your site runs on. Slow server speed, downtime, and disconnects can cause search spiders to abandon their cause. While not very common, it is a possibility. So, since in hosting you get what you pay for, investing in a quality host with good hardware and excellent availability is always worth it.

Ping Services

Ping services offer another effective way to notify search engines of your existence. Pingomatic is one such tool that you can use to notify multiple search engines at once, and another you can try is Pingler. WordPress does have a default feature to ping services but giving one of these other options a shot can’t hurt.

Comment In Other Sites To Index Your New WordPress Website In Search Engines

Since one of the sites in my example was a premium job and some complications within a given time-frame, I added almost 30+ comments for on another popular WordPress websites. I did not check for do-follow or nofollow attributes, but I did comment on popular, high traffic blogs. This can make that search engine bots will follow the comment links and will land on my blog.