You’ve taken the leap and created a stunning WordPress website but now your website won’t show up in Google search results when you enter the name of your site. How come?
The reason is that Google needs a little help from you to recognize your newly created website.
After you’ve finished your website and it’s ready for the world, the next step is creating a Google Search Console account for your website.
Submit Your Sitemap to Google
First, verify ownership of your website and submit your website’s sitemap to Google.
This will direct Google to index/crawl your website for the first time.
If for some reason you don’t want to create a search console account or can’t verify authorization of your website, you can directly submit your website’s URL to Google here.
However, it’s more likely that Google will index your entire website in a timely manner if you submit your sitemap to Google through your search console account.
If you haven’t created a sitemap or don’t know what a sitemap is, stay tuned for our next article on how to create a sitemap using the Yoast SEO plugin.
How to Get Your Website to Appear in Search Engine Results
After you’ve submitted your sitemap to Google, you can expect to see your website on Google’s search engine results pages, or SERPs, for a name/brand search within one week. This means if you search your websites name, a description and link to your website will appear in the results.
However, if your website is a travel blog, for example, you’re not likely to immediately rank for search queries like “Best 10 Travel Blogs” just yet.
You need to develop an authoritative website within the travel blogging space and build a well thought out search engine optimization, or SEO, strategy first. Then you can start targeting more of these in-market search terms.
If you’re new to the SEO world, I recommend you read up on search engine optimization basics to get a general idea of what you’ll need to get your site up in the rankings.
After you’ve created your website and notified Google, it’s up to you to create engaging content that connects with users who occupy your corner of the internet.
Assuming you have high quality content that provides value to your audience, the next step is distributing the content to as many of those people as possible.
Good luck and as always,
