Are you
looking for better search engine rankings?
Of course, you can spend
your way to success on Google. But that comes with some serious downsides—namely,
it’s expensive and the traffic evaporates as soon as you stop spending.
Instead, if you’re low on
funds, focus your efforts on organic search engine traffic through SEO, or
search engine optimization.
Thankfully, Google has
given us a simple tool to understand how it sees your site, what issues might
be affecting your traffic, and how you can improve the site for better rankings
and results.
That tool is
known as Google Search Console.
The tool has been around
for a while, and it used to be known as Google Webmaster Tools, and Google
Webmaster Central before that.
In 2015, Google rebranded
it as Google Search Console—so if you’ve seen different terms, don’t worry.
They’re all different names for essentially the same thing.
The great thing about
Google Search Console, or GSC, is that it’s completely free. And it’s made by
Google itself, so the advice comes straight from the source.
Here’s how
you can use GSC to maximize your SEO results.
Adding your website
To start things off,
you’ll need to set up a free account with GSC. Then you’ll need to verify that
you actually own the site you’re going to analyze.
(Unfortunately, there
isn’t a way to check up on your competitor’s sites with this tool. You must
prove ownership to inspect a site.)
Start by clicking the “add
property” button on the left-hand dropdown.
From there, just enter
your site name. Remember that it’s a strict entry, meaning http: and https: are
counted as different sites.
Next, you’ll need to
verify that you own the site. Google provides a few different ways of doing
this.
The recommended method is
to add an HTML file to your server. But you can also add a meta tag, edit your
DNS settings, or connect to your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager
account.
Dashboard
Once your site is verified
you’ll start seeing data on your website. Sometimes it can take a few hours
before you see any data, but it’ll start rolling in.
Once it does, you can use
a few different tools to explore what Google sees—overview, performance, and
URL inspection.
Overview gives you a rough
overview of everything from what keywords you are ranking for to how much
traffic you are getting.
In addition to that you’ll
see if the Google bot is experiencing any crawl errors when going through your
website, the number of sites linking to yours, and how many pages Google has
indexed.
With Performance, you can
see a more detailed breakdown of your site’s performance on Google.
And with URL inspection,
you can explore any single URL. Just type it into the search bar at the top of
the screen, and you’ll be presented with a quick report on how Google sees the
URL, like this.
Site index
Just like everything else,
Google isn’t perfect. So configuring your site can help them do a better job of
ranking your website.
When configuring there are
a few areas that you should be familiar with.
Coverage
There will be some pages
on your website that you just don’t want Google to index. These could be
private login areas, RSS feeds, or crucial data that you don’t want people
accessing.
On the coverage tab you
can see a basic report of pages on your site.
It’s broken into a few
categories—pages with an error, valid with warnings, valid, and excluded. You
should try to have zero pages with errors or warnings.
The number of valid and
excluded pages depends on what you’d like Google to index, and what you want to
keep private.
By creating a robots.txt
file you can block not just Google, but all search engines from accessing web
pages that you don’t want them to get their hands on.
However, for highly
sensitive areas of your website you may want to consider password protecting
all relevant directories.
Through a robots.txt
generator and tester, not only will you be able to create a robots.txt file,
but you will be able to see if it is done correctly before you upload it to
your server.
Here’s a
simple generator from SEOBook.
It’s wise to do because
the last thing you want to do is make a mistake and tell them not to index your
whole website.
And if you accidentally
mess up and find Google indexing pages that you don’t want them to index, you
can request them to remove it through this section.
Sitemaps
Next up is sitemaps. This
is basically a “table of contents” for your site that can help Google find
every page on your site and understand its hierarchy.
Submitting a sitemap will
help Google determine what pages you have on your website so they can index
them.
If you don’t submit a
sitemap they may not index all of the pages on your website, which means you
won’t get as much traffic.
Sitemaps have to be
submitted in an XML format and they can’t contain more than 50,000 URLs or be
larger than 10 megs.
If you exceed any of those
limits, you need to split up your sitemap in multiple files and then submit
them.
If you aren’t technical,
you can go to XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap. All you have to do is enter in
your URL of your homepage and click “start”.
Once your sitemaps have
been uploaded, Google will tell you how many of your URLs are being indexed.
Don’t worry, it is common for them to not index all of your web pages.
But your
goal should still be to get as many pages indexed as possible.
Typically if pages aren’t
being indexed it’s because the content on those pages isn’t unique, the title
tags and meta descriptions are generic, and not enough websites are linking to
your internal pages.
Enhancements
Right now, the only option
under “Enhancements” is “Mobile Usability.”
Ideally, you’ll want every
page on your site to work on mobile with zero errors.
Other
There are a few more
options at the bottom of the menu bar. Let’s dive into those next.
Manual
actions
First up is manual
actions, a rather confusingly-named category. According to Google’s own support
team, it basically just means “flagged as spam by a human.”
In their own
words:
“Google’s algorithms can
detect the vast majority of spam and demote it automatically; for the rest, we
use human reviewers to manually review pages and flag them if they violate the
guidelines.”
So if your
site seems spammy, you’ll get a notification here.
The only thing you should
see on this page is a “No issues detected” notification—anything else means
you’ve done something wrong, and you need to fix it immediately.
Links
The links report provides
a wealth of data about where your site is receiving links, what those links
say, and where they’re linking to.
It’s broken up into two
main categories—internal and external links.
Internal links are from
within your site, which is a great way to get more Google love.
When you link to a page
from another page, it tells Google that page is important to your site. For
example, I link to my SEO tools at the bottom of every page of NeilPatel.com.
Since every single page is
linking to those tools, Google realizes they’re important and is more likely to
rank them higher in search results.
If you don’t link to your
internal pages, they will not get as much PageRank and they won’t place as well
in the search listings.
The second category is
external links. These are links to your website from other sites.
As you can imagine, these
are harder to get but much more valuable. In fact, these external links—also
known as backlinks—are often considered to be the top ranking factor Google
uses.
The best way to increase
your rankings on Google is to get more sites to link to you.
This can sometimes happen
just by posting great content, but it’s usually a good idea to promote it to
others in your industry so they know about it.
Either way, you can see
your complete link profile here and work on weak areas to get better search
result placings in the future.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to grow
your SEO reach and start doing better on Google, you need to play by their
rules.
And if you’re going to do
that, the best way is to follow their advice. Start paying attention to
Google’s recommendations and making your site fit their requirements and
expectations.
The simplest way is with
the free Google Search Console. In just a few minutes, you can start
understanding your website from Google’s point of view.
How will you improve your
site with Google Search Console?
A Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Console-onlinejobworks
Reviewed by OnlineJobWorks
on
January 25, 2019
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