You can't get to your room without checking in at the hotel: and that is undoubtedly a big problem on holiday. The same applies to the search engines: You have a great website, but Google and Co. don't know anything about it? That can be remedied. Here's how!
Check-in at the hotel: you've arrived, let others know!
Without checking in at the hotel, you can't get into your room: and that's undoubtedly a big problem on holiday. The same goes for search engines: You have a great website, but Google and Co. don't know anything about it? That can be remedied. Here's how!
Why you should submit your website to search engines
First of all, unlike in a hotel, you don't have to register with the search engines. Their crawlers scour the internet around the clock to detect new web pages and changes. Since the crawlers also track links, they will usually stumble across your website sooner or later. It still makes sense to "register" them, because then you speed up the process considerably. If you are already planning your summer SEO, you can do it right away - it's not complicated at all!
The little checklist for your search engine submission:
- Do you know where your sitemap is stored?
- Have you submitted it to Google?
- .
- ... and also with Bing?
- Have you checked after the registration if everything has worked out?
How to check in for your website
Both Google and Bing use Search Console for registration. What you also need for this is the sitemap of the website, which you can usually find there:
- yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
- yourdomain.com/sitemap/index.xml
... but depending on the CMS, the exact location may differ.
Checking in your website with Google
Now you go to the Search Console, which you can find here: https://search.google.com/search-console
In order for this to work at all, you should have added your website to Search Console. There are instructions for this directly from Google here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=de
Navigate to the "Sitemaps" tab and copy the URL of your sitemap into it before confirming with "Submit". Now do this with every sitemap you want to have indexed. You will receive confirmation that it has worked with a simple "Successful", which should be displayed directly afterwards.
How to submit your website to Bing
First, register with Bing Webmaster (https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about). Bing also makes the process easier by allowing you to import existing websites from Search Console into Bing Webmaster. Submit your sitemap there as well, which Microsoft passes on directly to Yahoo, so you have the search engine covered at the same time.
Check everything again at the end
You can display indexed URLs on Google via the "Coverage" tab, then click on "Valid". But don't be surprised if it doesn't happen quite as quickly as in the hotel: the search engines usually need a few days until your website is listed and fully covered.
As you can see, this step in your summer SEO planning was not difficult at all and does not cost much time. On the other hand, your website is now listed even faster, which of course accelerates its success.