How to Ensure Your Site is Indexed Regularly by Google
In the old days you’d expect that the obvious answer to this was to continually submit your site to the search engines and you’d be away. Sadly not only was this not very time effective, it just wasn’t very effective full-stop.
Once Google got around to processing your request you were probably about ready to send another one. Now you can save yourself the bother.
Whilst you might still choose to submit your site at the outset, that is probably enough. There are far more effective way for you to get the attention of search engines today, the most effective being strong links and your Webmaster Tools Account. Let’s see how both work.
First up, your Webmaster Tools. I’ve spoken about this a bit recently, but the Webmaster Tools software is surprisingly versatile [see: How Webmaster Tools Can Be Used to Improve Your Site]. Not only will it allow you to find out what issues your site is currently facing, not least broken links and page load time problems, but it can also alert the search engines to each page on your site.
How? Simple really, you just submit your XML Sitemap. This gives Google or Bing the opportunity to see what pages you have at your disposal and even where they rank in terms of importance. This isn’t just a passive guide, but actually acts as a straightforward entry point for the spiders to start crawling.
It seems elementary, but many things in SEO are. Creating an XML Sitemap isn’t exactly rocket science and adding it to Webmaster Tools is even easier. The effect this can have on the speed and regularity with which your primary pages are indexed can be huge.
Next up are those links again. We all know that inbound links are good for SEO, but occasionally there are some who are perhaps not entirely sure of their full benefit. Well, apart from driving traffic and building site authority, they can also lead search engine spiders on to your site.
You see, when a spider finishes on one site it wants to follow the suggested pathway, which in many instances is a link to a secondary website. If you can ensure that is your link to your site, then you can bolster your opportunities for getting indexed significantly.
As with all links, the more popular the source site is and the more authority it has, the more it will attract the attention of search engine crawlers. Therefore, it doesn’t take too much imagination to suggest that these links provide greater value in your efforts to ensure your site doesn’t get overlooked.
All of this work will of course benefit your site in other ways. Webmaster Tools is free way of quickly assessing your sites performance and how visitors navigate around the domain. It’ll provide feedback that will prove vital in future SEO efforts. Links on the other hand are absolutely essential to Search Engine Optimisation.
