Straight after launching your brand new website, you may think users will come to visit and use it. But things don’t work just that way, unfortunately. Before getting visitors, there are a series of measures you have to take, like indexing your website on search engines.  In other words, you have to make the search engines notice your website, put it on their search result and rank it among others. 

One most important thing about indexing your website and SEO is that you should never forget the long-term battle that will bring you much closer to the goal than the short-term actions you may take, and just sit back and relax, as most of the website owners do. The reason for taking the long-term actions more seriously is that search engines rank higher websites that provide high-quality and readable content, relevant for its subject and interesting for users. 

#1 How Search Engines Act 

Basically the entire process of releasing search results are divided into three steps:

• Crawl
• Index
• Rank

Crawling is the first process that a search engine does via bots, crawlers or spiders, to discover the website, structure, content, sitemap, and instructions. This is a reading process, where all the information is being assimilated based on the instructions given by the search engines

Indexing is the process related to understanding and putting together the entire information that was read from websites. So, if your content is relevant and high-quality, there are more chances that you will be positioned higher in the next process

Ranking is the latest process that starts once you interrogate the search engine with specific words and combinations of words. Based on the neural algorithm that we have talked about in our last article,  developed by google – the most popular search engine at the time of writing this article, the search engine calculates the keywords and accents in the interrogation in the search query, so that it would understand better what you really search for. Also, what is important to mention is that search engines are friendly to unique, high-quality content, relevant and interesting for users and furthermore, there are more factors that will determine your rank for specific search queries. It depends on how much time users spent in the first place on your page with information, how many clicked your web page when they were given a series of other resources to get that information and of course the bounce algorithm – from what pages they landed on yours, and on the contrary, to what pages users go after visiting your web page. 

So, to sum up, the  most important ranking factors on search engines are: 

• Content quality
• Keyword Focus
• Time spent on your page
• Click-Through Rate
• Bounce Rate

One more important thing about the 3-step process is that it never stops. Search engines always perform these operations daily, so that it’s always up-to-date and provides the most relevant results for users.  The question now is How can you speed up the process and see the results of your website on Search Engines?

 For organic growth – which we totally recommend, you will be needing two things. 

• Sitemap XML file
• Integration with Google Search Console

These two are interdependent and work with each other and as well with the search engine. Apart from Google, there are other search engines as well, like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and others. But this article is more for Google, as it will cover most of the world market.

#2 How to Get Your Website Found, Indexed and Ranked By Google

As we mentioned previously, you will be needing XML sitemap file and Integration with Google Search Console

The Sitemap XML file lists information about your website, in plain language, and counts the most important existing pages. As tested for WordPress-based websites, the sitemap helps Google find the pages and explore the website. There are numerous plugins and Sitemap creators for websites at this moment, so it won’t be difficult to find a good solution at this moment. Once you have the sitemap file and integrated it with your website,  the next thing that needs to be done is to set up a Google Search Console Account.

As the sitemap and Google Search Console are interdependent and work with each other, before setting up an account, you will need a sitemap – the one you already have created. 

The second thing to do is to verify your website with Google Search Console. And next is to insert your sitemap so that Google could crawl, index and rank faster your website. 

With Google Search Console you will be able to monitor your website’s performance on organic traffic, keywords, countries, pages. But as well, the tool will detect pages with errors and other important metrics that you need to know. 

Another advantage, and we would say the most important one of the Google Search Console, is that you can let Google know immediately about the brand new page you have, and apply for a crawling request straight away. Within 24 Hours, you will see how the page starts to perform, and you will be able to follow the user-website organic activity and take fast decisions on how you can improve, change, or redirect the traffic to other pages. 

#3 What’s Next?

Just after you finished the entire process you don’t need to sit back and relax. The fight for a good position on search engines is just about to begin, and the best thing you can do is to start creating high-quality content and placing it on your pages, and then requiring Google to crawl those pages as soon as possible. 

Based on Mobiteam’s experience, we recommend focusing on the quality of the content and not on the quantity. This means that if you follow the trends, the rules, and release nice content once in a week, it is much better than writing 5-6 materials per day, and getting no or small results.