SEO and Google Search Console or Webmaster tools

Hi Learners,

Welcome to Analogue to AI Blog. In our previous post, we went through a step by step process to create a website visibility plan. To re-cap, read the post here. In this post we will take our first step towards website SEO, thats adding our website to the Google Search console or most popularly known as Webmaster tools.

What is a Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service that provides valuable information about your website like how do people "discover" your site, what keywords does your website shows up in the search result for, what keywords drive the most engaging traffic on the site, what pages are most popular on your site and how many pages are "Indexed" by Google. It also provides information about errors on your site and mobile responsiveness of your site and many such incredibly useful reports. Check out the below video for a better understanding.

Adding or Verifying website with Google Search Console

Google needs to verify that you are authorised to access information that it will share with you, so this is the first crucial step. Generally the steps are standard across all types of websites.

Step 1: Log into Google Search Console
Step 2: Add "Property" thats your website to the Search console.

Step 3: Verify your site. Once you add a property, you will be directed to verify ownership of your website. If you have a Google Analytics account, choose the Google Analytics method. And click on "Verify"

Done!

Once your website is verified, the next step is to submit sitemaps to Google's database.

Generating Sitemaps and adding them to Google (Wordpress)

To manage SEO on your wordpress website, we will use a plugin called Yoast. This means you need to first install Yoast plugin on your Wordpress website to get started.

To do this...

Step 1 - Log in to your wordpress admin dashboard.

Step 2 - From the left menu click on "Plugins"

Step 3 - Click on Add new and search for "Yoast"

Step 4 - Click on "Install Now" and then Activate as soon as the button text changes. Once done, you will see a new option called SEO appear on the left hand side of your Wordpress dashboard.

Follow the below process to enable and generate sitemaps.

When you click on the SEO menu, it expands into more options. When you click on General...

Click on Features

Find Sitemaps from the list and set it to "On"

To view sitemaps, 

Now that you have your sitemaps, its time to submit them to Google Search console.

Step 1 - Go to your Search Console Dashboard and Click on Crawl --> Sitemaps

Step 2 - Click on Add Sitemap, and copy paste the Sitemap URLs generated from Yoast plugins and submit them here.

 

Once submitted, Google generally takes 24 hours to calibrate your sitemaps and starts with the crawling and indexing process. You need to keep in mind that once you have submitted your sitemaps, its not a guarantee that your site will start ranking immediately. 

SEO is a slow and a consistent process. Your persistence, quality of content and frequency of update allows Google to consider your website as important.

Hope you found this post as valuable. Leave your comments in the section below and dont forget to share your feedback about this post.

Wait back for the next post as we sail through more ideas of getting your websites indexed and influencing google to rank website.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia