Here are some quick tips and links to see if your WordPress website is ranking in Google.
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, here in San Antonio, Texas at WebTegrity. If you follow our channel, you know that we’re doing a video like this, every single Wednesday. Please be sure to subscribe. I’ll have a goody like this, in your inbox, every week that helps you improve your online marketing. Improve your WordPress website.
Today’s video is just, very quickly, how to understand if Google can even index your site. Can they even read your site? Are they crawling our site? Why aren’t we ranking higher? There are some quick questions that you can find some fast answers to. I’m gonna teach you how to do that, right now. I’m gonna slide off the screen, so you can
stay focused here.
One of the first things you want to do is check your robot’s file. You can go to the end of your domain name and just type in “robots” (plural) dot txt and click “Enter”. You’ll want to see a file here that addresses the robots. Which are, of course, the crawlers from the search engines. This little file. This robots txt file, speaks directly to them and tells them where they’re allowed to go on your server. What pages they’re allowed to view and what pages they’re allowed to render or files they’re allowed to render to the public. Now, this is not totally secure in the sense that if the crawlers decide not to pay attention to it, they can get to things, anyway. For the most part, they honor this file. You can see here that I’m not disallowing anything. I’m allowing all agents to crawl our website. Google likes to see things pretty open wide. So, you want to be sure that not a lot is locked down and disallowed. Check that area first.
The second thing you want to be sure to have on your website, is a site map. Our’s (and this is very typical) is linked down in our footer. “Site Map” click there. Of course, this is being generated with the plugin Yoast. So, if you’re using a WordPress website, you can use Yoast (Y-O-A-S-T SEO) and that free plugin will automatically generate a sitemap. It creates this link here. “sitemap_index.xml” and dynamically lists out all of your pages for your website and all of your posts for your website. Whatever you allow it to list out. It will list them all out here and let people see and let the search engines see everything on your website. So, that’s super cool. Of course, once you’ve created that sitemap, you certainly want to submit it to Google Webmaster tools, so that they can monitor it. They can index all those pages and hopefully help you to get ranking higher.
If you don’t know how to do that,I have other videos specifically on the Yoast plugin to teach you how to do that. I’ll put the link to this playlist in the description box below. It is a part 1 of 4, that teaches you how to use this Yoast plugin and teaches you how to submit your sitemap to Google. That’s a step-by-step four-part series. It’s pretty incredible. You definitely want to do that.
You also can do this…
You can simply submit your URL to Google asking them to come crawl your site. So, you would just type in here “webtegrity.wpengine.com” and you would say that “I am not a robot” and “submit URL”. This is submitting specifically to Google and it will tell me “Alright, great job. Your request has been received successfully”. That’s this little alert here. So, you can submit more if you needed to. Now, I want you to know that you have to be logged in, in order to get this inside of your free webmaster tools option. I will put the link to this option in the description box below. So, you’ll want to do that and make sure that Google is indexing your site and loves your site. This is another way to see if this is working…Not only inside of Google Webmaster Tools. They will give you an alert right away telling you “Hey, something is going on. We have some crawl errors that you need to fix.” But, you can do this cool little trick.
Check this out.
Come to Google and type in the word “site” and type in “webtegrity” or your domain name. You don’t need the “www” or anything like that. Just the naked URL. Type that in and click “enter”. This will give you a list of all your pages and posts and all the different things that Google has indexed that live on your server. This is kind of a cool view to, to see what your page titles look like, all the way down the list. You certainly don’t want things that say “Home” or “Blog”. You want SEO friendly titles down this list. And, of course, page after page of all these different resources that live on your website.
So, if you’re having something like this happen as a result of your search on Google, you know that your website is being crawled. So, that’s a first part of learning about your websites crawl-ability. (If that’s a word) If it’s being indexed at all. These are some great steps to make sure and find out.
If you’re finding, no in fact, my website is not having a lot of pages found and I don’t like the results that I’m seeing here, I’d like you to check out an SEO course that I have over on our website. It’s a basic of SEO class. It’s about a 45 minute session that really teaches you step-by-step how to improve your websites SEO. I also have another really cool free class here, of understanding Google analytics. So, if you need to understand more of how to track the traffic that’s hitting your site, check out that video.
Alright guys, I’m gonna put all those links in the description box below. If you have questions about SEO, that’s what my company is here to help with. Give us a shout out. Come over to Twitter. Come over to our website. Find us on Facebook. We’re around and I’d love to help you nerd out and improve your WordPress website with this SEO.
Have a great WordPress Wednesday. Bye, ya’ll.
Submit your Sitemap to Google / Yoast Playlist
Submit your website to Google
Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console)
