Getting Indexed

December 11th, 2019

   

Getting_Indexed
IMPORTANT NOTE: When you originally setup your site, search engine bots were uninvited. You must change that setting if you expect to get listed in any of those search indices.

You may allow search engines to visit your WordPress pages only AFTER:

  • You have set up your WP theme, plugins and all the settings.
  • You have published your Primary Keyword main page and at least 5 Inner Pages of Quality Content
  • You have About, Contact, Terms, Privacy, Disclaimer, Sitemap for visitors and any other pages as necessary in place
  • Your Robots.txt file is uploaded on the root directory
  • You have reset the frequency options in your Google XML Sitemaps plugin to their original default values (if you are using it).
  • You have added StatCounter or other tracking service on your website (disable your IP from the visitor count so as not to count yourself).

Enable search engines by Navigating to Settings >> Privacy and selecting ‘Allow search engines to index this site’ (or ‘I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines…’) and Save Changes.

Starting with WordPress ver 3.5 this function was moved to Settings >> Reading. Untick the box marked ‘Search Engine Visibility’ [] Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

To check if your site is indexed by Google

  • type site:http://yournewdomain.TLD/ into Google’s search window (no spaces!)
  • If your site is indexed, you will see a list of the pages that Google knows about

If your site is not yet indexed, learn how to submit it to the following five social bookmark sites and ping it in the next module:

Additionally, you can list your site at howismysite.com to jumpstart traffic.

Another slick trick is to use the Google Keyword Planner tool to search your site for keywords. This will force Google to index the site and associate it with your main keywords.

When your site has been successfully indexed, wait about 30-45 days to see where your pages settle in the SERPs, then do additional off-Page SEO as needed.

Now let’s do some social bookmarking.