Search indexing is by far the most important aspect of SEO that has not been discussed yet is getting your website indexed. If your website is not indexed by search engines, then it will never show up in search results, no matter how optimized your website is for search engines.
There are two tools that are crucial for this process: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools allow your website to get indexed by Google and Bing. Google, of course, is important because it holds 90% of global market share for search. On the other hand, Bing only holds about 3%. However, Bing’s search index is utilized by other engines such as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.
Preparation for Search Indexing
Before submitting your website to be indexed by search engines, there is some preparation that must be done. The two components that you’ll need are a robots.txt file and a sitemap. Robots.txt is a file that tells robots what URLs they are and aren’t allowed to crawl. A sitemap outlines all of your pages in a single place to make your site easier to index.
Adding to Google Search Console
If you want to add your website to google search console. Google first asks you to verify that you are the administrator of the website. There are a number of ways that google allows you to do this. With the URL-prefix property type, you may add an html file to your website, add a custom meta tag to your homepage, use your Google Analytics account, or your Google Tag Manager account, or associate your DNS record with Google. If you use the domain property, you must verify it with DNS.
Once you have added your site, you can add your sitemap under the indexing section. Give Google some time to process everything, and your website will start appearing in Google search results. If you would like to verify it appears, you can enter “site:mydomain.com” in a google search for the results to filter to only your website.
Adding to Bing Webmaster Tools
Adding your site to Bing Webmaster Tools is a similar process. First, you verify that you are a site admin by, uploading an xml file to your website provided by Bing, adding a meta tag to your homepage, adding a CNAME record to your DNS, or importing your website from Google Search Console.
Once your site is verified, you may add your sitemaps to Bing in the sitemaps category on the left sidebar. Bing will take up to 48 hours to process. To verify, you can use the same method with google and use “site:mydomain.com” to filter search results to only your website.
2 Responses
I like that you explain how to index for both Google and Bing. You also give a specific time frame for Bing, and I think having a specific for Google as well would be helpful.
I like how you dove into each separately. I usually use Google, and I think that is probably the common approach. These are very important things to know how to do and it wouldn’t have crossed my mind if I didn’t read this.