How To Make My Website Show On Google (14 Simple Steps)

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Picture this: You’ve poured hours into crafting the perfect website, but it’s like a fantastic book collecting dust on a back shelf. It’s not showing up on Google. This is a common hurdle for many in the blog growth engine community. This article will guide you through the steps to index your website and ensure it shows up on Google, turning your hidden gem into a visible asset.

A fantastic tool called notion to blog can make this process a breeze. It helps you notice and index your site, ensuring your hard work doesn’t go unseen.

How To Make My Website Show on Google in 14 Simple Steps

1. Submit an XML Sitemap to Google Search Console

One efficient way to inform Google you have a new website or content is through an XML sitemap submitted to your Google Search Console account. The XML sitemap contains a list of URLs you want Google to crawl and index. Using it, you can suggest that Google crawl and index whole batches of URLs rather than submitting each URL manually.

Your XML sitemaps should update automatically after every change you make. That way, Google will always be updated on your website’s whereabouts and can recrawl pages if needed.

How to submit an XML sitemap:

Log on to Google Search Console.

Choose a property.

Click the Sitemaps button in the right-column menu

Enter the sitemap URL and click SUBMIT

Check the status of updated XML sitemaps

Do a quick check to see if your XML sitemap is valid

Enter your email

2. Submit Individual URLs in the Google Search Console

Apart from indicating all your meaningful URLs using an XML sitemap, you can also submit individual URLs through the Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool. Submitting your URLs can help speed up:

Discovery

Crawling

Indexing

This ensures your content is quickly visible in search results. But, of course, like anything else surrounding Google, there are no guarantees.

How to submit a URL for a recrawl in GSC Inspection Tool:

Log on to Google Search Console.

Choose a property.

Submit a URL from the website you want to get recrawled.

Check the URL in the inspection tool regularly.

Monitor the crawling and indexing table to see when Google last recrawled your website.

3. Add More Internal Links

The more internal links you have on your blog, the more a search engine understands that this page is essential and should be indexed. Your most important blog posts should not be 2-3 clicks away from the homepage of your site, and it helps to have a structure of your website that ensures that any other page can be found in just a few clicks.

Here are tools for performing a technical SEO review of your internal links and determining each page's crawl depth:

Screaming Frog

Ahrefs

SEMrush

Best ways to improve internal linking for blog posts:

Previous/next article navigation or breadcrumbs

Recent post sidebar or footer with “Related Stories.”

Relevant category, tag, and author pages

Legacy evergreen content (eg, your best content) on similar topics

Adding contextual links inside your blog content

4. Get More Backlinks

The size of your crawl budget depends on your website authority (also known as DR, DA, or AS in SEO tools). The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, the bigger your overall budget is and the faster your pages will get indexed. Over time, this can make a massive difference in search engine rankings, indexing speed, and brand authority, which is essential to a good SEO strategy.

Improving Website Visibility Through Backlinks

At this stage, you’ll want to ensure your site appears as one of the top results so that users see and click on your pages. That brings us to another way to get your website on Google: plant links to your site around the web. When the bots reach those blue text hyperlinks, they receive a command to proceed directly to your website.

Strategies for Obtaining High-Quality Backlinks

One way to obtain high-quality backlinks is to write content for other publications or blogs within your niche. This allows you to:

Show off your expertise

Build your brand's authority

Add a link to your site so readers (Google can better find you)

A second option is to post your URL in your social media profiles and online directories for your industry or geographic area. These links make it convenient for potential customers to access your business’s homepage and serve as a superhighway straight to your website.

5. Optimize On-page SEO

Well-optimized on-page SEO elements like title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, schema markup, etc., intrinsically demonstrate relevance and quality to Googlebot. It’s important to perform an SEO audit frequently.

Pages needing more crucial SEO metadata need faster crawl prioritization. On-page optimization proves you created content for users, not just bots.

Perform Keyword Research: Identify relevant keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for.

Optimize Title Tags: To help search engines understand the content, include the focus keyword in each page's title tag.

Use Headers: Organize your content with header tags (e.g., H1, H2, H3) to improve readability and emphasize important topics.

Write Compelling Meta Descriptions: Craft informative and engaging meta descriptions that include your focus keyword to encourage users to click on your page.

Optimize Image Alt Text: Add descriptive alt text to images, including relevant keywords, to help search engines understand the visual content.

Implement Structured Markup: Use schema markup to provide additional information about your content, making it more accessible to search engines.

Optimize URLs: Create clear and concise URLs (or slugs) that include your focus keyword to improve user experience and search engine understanding.

Ensure Mobile Responsiveness: Make sure your blog is optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless user experience (and, like in our example, your content is actively being read by Google’s smartphone crawler).

Improve Site Speed: Optimize your blog's loading speed to enhance user experience and search engine rankings.

6. Technical SEO & site indexing issues

If your site has issues, they might impact the crawler's ability to stop processing or indexing it. The crawlers simply can’t continue spidering and going through your site page by page, so it’s critical to make sure you address all the technical SEO issues first.

Here is a quick technical SEO checklist when it comes to indexation:

Robots.txt

User-agent: *

Allow: /

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Disallow: /cdn-cgi/

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Add a robots.txt file to the root of your domain, similar to the example above. Allow the root path “/” and disallow any pages that should not be crawled but might have internal links to them. Such as the “/cdn-cgi/” path if you use Cloudflare or “/wp-admin/” if you use Wordpress.

This is critical for saving your crawl budget and ensuring every search engine finds your sitemap.

Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs are critical for ensuring your pages are indexed and crawled once per visit. If you have slightly different versions, for example, (/blog/indexing) and (/blog/SEO/indexing), because of your site structure, you need to set a canonical meta tag to ensure search engines know exactly which page is the right one.

In most cases, you must first [set Canonical URLs](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization). For example, if you have an affiliate program, you might have many links with query strings such as “/blog/indexing?ref=ilias,” which search engines like Google will see as a different page entirely.

Optimizing Content Crawling with Unique Parameters

For content with unique parameters, filter (?sort=price) or search (?q=text). Each variation can be counted as a new crawl on the page. This will help you save your crawl budget, prevent indexing issues with multiple URLs and keyword cannibalization, and centralize link equity (or link juice) to a specific page.

Server Errors

If you have pages with 500 or 404 errors internally linking to them, this might affect your indexing speed, the indexation status of those pages, and the rest of your website.

Troubleshooting Page Indexing Errors in Google Search Console

You can see all the pages with server errors in Google Search Console. Go to the “Page Indexing” section and see why pages aren’t indexed. Note that you won’t be able to fix everything; 404 errors can happen naturally if you remove the page from your site. But make sure to set redirects or fix broken links if you change the path of a page.

Server errors (5xx) should be fixed immediately. Proactively monitoring site health in GSC or SEO tools can fix, prevent, and notify you of these issues.

7. Publish Higher-Quality Content

Each site has a limited crawl budget; Google can process the total number of URLs per session—excessive low-value pages strain site budgets, slowing new content indexing. If you have a lot of outdated, duplicated, or low-quality blog content, it causes a lot of competition for your crawl budget, making crawling your website slower.

Refreshing Existing Blog Posts for Better SEO

For SEO, it’s often better to refresh existing blog posts for a higher content ROI and to improve the ranking of those articles. For example, if you have duplicate or thin blog content, you can merge it with a 301 redirect. It’s important to keep publishing focused on ensuring existing pages bring value before diluting efforts. Every unnecessary poor page delays good page indexing.

8. Use Google Indexing Tools

[Google indexing tools](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro) are essential for making your website visible to search engines. They help submit your website URLs to search engines, allowing them to crawl and index your website's pages. Once your website is indexed, search engine users can find your website when searching for relevant keywords or phrases.

Here is a list of some of the most effective website indexing tools:

URL inspection in Google Search Console

Google Search Console allows you to submit your website's URLs and sitemaps directly to Google, ensuring that Google indexes your website. You submit the URLs in the URL inspection tool, which will instantly crawl and index the page. The downside is that it’s a long process if you have a large selection of pages.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster tools help you submit your website URLs to Bing, allowing it to crawl and index your website's pages. It also provides features to help you understand your website's performance and improve its search engine rankings.

Note that Bing is the underlying search engine for DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Ecosia, and other search engines. So, it's critical to set up Bing and the IndexNow API.

9. Promote Your Content

While Google has never officially admitted that social media performance affects a website's visibility in search results, successfully promoting your content on social media directly impacts that content’s organic performance.

Social media aside, promoting your content is vital to content marketing. Creating high-quality content alone hasn’t been enough for many years to move the needle. You should spend at least as much time promoting your content as you did creating it.

10. Prove That You’re a Local

Local business owners, this step is for you. Within the broader SEO world, there’s an area known as local SEO, where Google helps direct location-specific searchers to solutions in their geographic location. Why is this important? Most people search Google’s search box to find the business they’re looking for before taking a stroll down Main Street.

Leveraging Google My Business for Local SEO

Google My Business is the response to this reality. It is a directory of business listings that populates what appears on Google Maps and what’s displayed in the Local Pack (that map and three business options that appear at the top of searches with a specified location). In addition to keywords, creating a Google My Business account is one more way to give Google a hint that your business will be a quality result to display to users.

11. Optimize Images for Google Search

Google’s algorithms can’t read images to see what they depict, so it may seem that images can’t affect your SEO. Nevertheless, if you optimize your images for SEO, they can benefit your rankings.

Optimizing Images with Alt Tags for SEO and Accessibility

The main thing you can do to improve your images is to use alt tags to describe what they depict. That will provide textual information that Google can use to understand and rank image content. Google’s ability to put words to the image will help it rank in Google Images, which offers another way for you to get found via more Google searches. And having alt tags will make your site more accessible for those with screen readers, improving your user experience!

12. Increase Your Page Load Speed

Even if many people find you on Google, it may not help you. The real goal is getting site traffic from Google. And for that to happen, your website must provide a positive user experience.

Page load speed is a big part of that. Users expect pages to load within two seconds, so you must ensure that all of yours meet that expectation. Here are a few ways to increase page speed:

Cache web pages

Compress images

Limit redirects

13. Implement Responsive Design

Another way to improve the user experience on your site is to employ responsive design. In other words, optimize your website for desktop and mobile formats. With so many people now surfing the Internet on their phones, this is a crucial step to get right. Beyond just improving the user experience, responsive design is a must for your SEO.

Google ranks websites based on their mobile format, so if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you won’t rank and get found on Google.

14. Launch a Pay-per-Click (PPC) Ad Campaign

Getting site traffic from Google isn’t always easy to do. Sometimes, you may find yourself where the best thing to do is pay to display your content. This is especially true if you want quick results while waiting to establish organic rankings.

In Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you can bid on keywords you want to target with your ads. Whenever one of those keywords is searched, Google will display the ads of the highest bidders. You only have to pay for an ad when someone clicks on it. When that happens, users will be directed to a landing page you create for the ad. It is an efficient and cost-effective way to make your web content appear in Google results.

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How Google Finds and Indexes New Websites

When you first launch your website, Google needs to find it. This is where crawling comes in. A Google bot, often called a crawler or spider, might stumble upon your site by following a link from another site or after you submit a sitemap directly. During this step, Google:

Scans your site to analyze content and structure

Reads the text and reviews layout

Interprets images and videos for context

Getting Listed: The Indexing Phase

After your site is crawled, it moves to the indexing stage. Here, Google determines if your site is worth showing in search results. Some factors can prevent indexing. If your site uses a “noindex” tag, for example, Google won’t add it to the index.

Submitting a Sitemap to Improve Website Crawling and Indexing

Similarly, pages with little value, duplicate content, or incorrect canonical tags might get skipped. Submitting a sitemap helps guide Google through your site. Once everything checks out, your site is added to Google’s search index, making it possible for your pages to rank and appear in search results.

The Race to the Top: Ranking

Ranking is where your website finally gets its time to shine. When someone searches for something relevant to your site, Google sifts through its index to find the best matches. If your site is a good fit, it will appear in the search results. Climbing to the top of those results is another game involving optimization, but getting your site indexed is the first step to starting to compete.

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Run your blog and newsletter with Feather today! Create a new account and send emails from Notion, or go from notion to blog in minutes!

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4 Factors That Influence a New Website's Ranking on Google

1. Age of the Domain: Why Older is Often Better

Google tends to favor domains with some history. An older domain appears more reliable and established. It doesn’t mean your new website will linger in obscurity, though. Focus on optimizing other factors to give your young site a fighting chance. With time, your domain will gain credibility and pay off your efforts.

2. Content Quality and Relevance: Keep It High and Helpful

Google loves good content. It wants to see well-written, valuable, and unique material that offers something meaningful to visitors. Your content should align with what your audience is searching for. This means doing the homework to understand their needs and crafting deliverable content.

3. Website Design and Structure: Make It Look Good and Easy to Use

A well-designed website is both visually appealing and user-friendly. People like to skim, so format your content to make that easy. Use short sentences, brief paragraphs, and headers to create a logical flow from start to finish.

4. Technical Aspects of the Website: Keep It Fast, Secure, and Mobile-Friendly

Google prioritizes websites that provide the best user experience. This includes how fast your site loads, how well it works on mobile devices, and how secure it is. These factors are all part of what Google looks for when ranking websites.

How Long Does It Take for Google to Index a Website

When you publish fresh content, you want it to appear on Google quickly. Yet, you might be staring at your analytics, wondering why Google won't index your website. In a world where the Google index is overflowing with billions of pages, you'd think there’d always be space for one more.

Understanding Google's Indexing Criteria

But Google has a mind of its own. And it’s not just about room. Google’s web crawlers don’t index everything they process. They’re picky, and they’ve got reasons. They choose not to index low-quality pages, duplicate content, or anything users likely won’t search for. After all, the best way to keep spam out of search results is not to index it in the first place.

How Long Does It Take Google to Index Your Site?

Recent research gives us a clearer picture. On average, 83% of pages get indexed in the first week. That’s the good news. But hold on. Some pages wait up to eight weeks for indexing. So, settle in if you’re asking how to make your website show on Google. It might take a while.

What Can You Do to Speed Things Up?

Focus on creating valuable, useful content to make your site show on Google faster. Provide unique insights, present well-researched information, and engage your audience. The more value you offer, the more likely Google will want to index your pages. And remember, not every page needs to be indexed.

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Go From Notion to Blog With Ease Today With Feather

How do you make your website appear on Google? Feather is your answer. It’s an SEO-friendly blog and email newsletter service that lets you publish blog content and newsletters through Notion. No coding or design skills are required. You can manage everything from a single platform, making focusing on content that boosts your search rankings easier.

Subfolders for SEO Success

Want better SEO? Feather allows you to set up a subfolder blog. This means your blog URL will be yoursite.com/blog instead of blog.yoursite.com. Why does this matter? Subfolders tend to perform better in search engine rankings, giving your content a higher chance of being seen.

Your HubSpot Experience, Simplified

Feather isn’t just about blogging. It lets you manage all your CRM and website blog tasks through Notion. Think of it as having the HubSpot experience without leaving your favorite workspace. This seamless integration helps you streamline operations, making focusing on content that can drive traffic and improve visibility easier.

Design Flexibility and Email Collection

Feather offers more than just content management. You can change your blog’s design with custom CSS and even collect emails from your readers. This flexibility in design and functionality supports your efforts to make your website show on Google by keeping your audience engaged.

Collaborate and Publish with Ease

Feather makes it simple to collaborate with your team during the publishing process. Write on Notion and automatically publish to your SEO-friendly blog. This ease of collaboration allows your team to focus on creating the best content, which is crucial for improving your search rankings.

Newsletters Straight from Notion

Feather also lets you set up and send newsletters directly from Notion. This means you can keep your audience updated without switching platforms. Regularly connecting with your audience through newsletters can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

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