Having Google crawl your pages is a very brilliant idea. People will be able to see your website whenever they search using related keywords. They will read your pages and they can convert if you are dealing with products and services. It will give you more exposure because Google is the most popular search engine.
Google Webmaster Tools
Currently referred to as Google search console, is offered by Google to give you a chance to see how your website is seen by the search engine. It also gives you reports and data that will help you understand how different pages on your website appear on the search engine results. With this data, you can improve your old articles, publish new content as well formulate your own content strategy.
GWT will also notify you if there is any problem with your website that is preventing Google from indexing your pages. You can therefore rectify the problems and have your website crawled by Google. It will also show you the search queries, where a page from your site appears in the results and how frequently it is clicked. With it, you can be able to submit the XML sitemap of your website, excluding the URLs.
How to submit?
You must have a Google Account in order to connect your website to Google Search Console.
The steps to submitting your site are as follows:
- Go to the Google Search Console, sign into your account and click on the Add Site button.
- After clicking on the button, type the URL of your website into the box and click on the Continue button.
- Get the code. To do this you will need to use the HTML tag which is under the Alternative Methods tab. Copy the code that is in bracket after the content.
- Log into your WordPress website and paste the code in the head section of the website. You can also use SEO plugins like Yoast to add the code to the website.
- Save the changes made.
- Go back to the Google Search Console and Click on the Verify button.
With those steps, you will have submitted your website to Google. If it is a new site, you will have to wait for Google identify your backlinks and index your pages. You will need to log into Google Search Console regularly to see the statistics. You could also submit a sitemap of your website to Google to hasten this process. For an old site, the sitemap will allow your site to interact with the search engine (Google) more efficiently. Google will be able to tell how regularly you update your website, the parts that are frequently updated and set the crawl rate for your website. This will improve the visibility of your site by the search engine.
