Submitting a website to Google means submitting all pages' URLs to Google, requesting Google to index this website. The webmasters should know how to do it, especially when you have a new website.
If you are not familiar with Sitemap, you should learn about it first.
What is Sitemap?
Sitemap is a text file containing all the URLs of a website (links to the main page, sub-pages, article pages, ...) and some updated information about your pages.
To submit a website to Google, you need to use a sitemap.
There are 2 main types of sitemap: sitemap.xml and sitemap.html. But in this article, we only use the sitemap.xml format. This file has the following content:
Why do We Need to Submit a New Website to Google?
Google uses a bot called "web crawlers" to automatically crawl websites. But if your website has just been published on the Internet, it may have not been indexed yet and displayed on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This crawling process takes a certain amount of time. If you do nothing and let Google do it automatically, it'll take a lot of time for your website to be displayed on SERP. Therefore, you should submit your website to Google to accelerate this process.
Benefits of Submitting a New Website to Google
Save Time and Have a Chance to Rank Higher
It takes about 4 days to 4 weeks to crawl and index a new website. This time changes depending on each website. Meanwhile, with just a few simple manipulations of submitting your site, your new website may be indexed much faster.
It helps your website to be displayed on SERP earlier. Therefore, your website will have the opportunity to reach customers sooner.
Supply Google with useful information
When you submit your website to Google with a sitemap, it provides Google with information such as last editing time, the hierarchy of the pages (help Google distinguish what are homepages, sub-pages, article pages, ...).
Otherwise, if you let Google crawl data automatically, it may not collect information fully and exactly as you want.
Make Sure Your Website to be Displayed on SERP
There may have mistakes when Google crawls website data. Therefore, some websites may not be indexed and appeared in SERP. It may be caused by some reasons:
- Indexing time is prolonged because there are many websites that need to be indexed in the same period of time.
- Your website lacks internal links and cohesion. For example, assuming you have a photography blog. But on your site, there are some articles about real estate. That time, Google may not find the link between these articles and the others, it may prolong the data-collecting process.
- Your website settings make Google difficult to index: If you block indexing for too many pages, your website structure may become more complicated and Google will need more time to crawl data.
Therefore, if your website is in the above cases, you should "force" Google to index your website by submitting a sitemap.
How to Submit a New Website to Google
Step 1: Find or Create a Sitemap for Your Website
Normally, your sitemap is created automatically. It has the URL as http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
For example, my sitemap is at http://gretathemes.com/sitemap.xml.
However, you can also create a sitemap using the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin has a free version on wordpress.org, you can install it directly from the Admin Dashboard.
After installing and activating Yoast SEO, go to SEO > General > Features, then find XML sitemaps > ON > Save changes.
Next, click on the question mark near the XML sitemaps section then click See the XML sitemap.
Your sitemap files are listed as follows:
So you've created a sitemap successfully. Now, your sitemap address is in the form of http://yourdomain/sitemap_index.xml. You can submit this URL to Google.
In addition, Yoast SEO has many other useful features that you can explore in this series.
Step 2: Submit Your Sitemap to Google
2.1. Verify Your Website Ownership
If you verified your website ownership before, skip this step. Otherwise, you must do the following:
First, sign in Google Search Console, go to Search property box > Add property.
After that, a popup will appear, you must enter your website's URL into the URL prefix box then click Continue.
When the Verify ownership dialog appears, you go to the HTML Tag tab in the Other verification methods section.
When you click on the HTML Tag tab, a code will appear and you need to copy it:
Next, you paste this code to somewhere like Notepad and copy the text string as I marked yellow in this picture:
After that, go back to your website to verify the above code. There are many ways to do it, but the easiest way is using Yoast SEO.
First, you need to install the Yoast SEO plugin. Then go to SEO > General > Webmaster Tools. In the Google verification code section, enter the code you've copied and click Save Changes.
Go back to the Google Search Console page once again, click Verify.
So you've finished verifying your website ownership.
Right after that, you will be moved to Webmaster Central. Let's click on Search console to start submitting your sitemap.
2.2. Submit Your Sitemap
In the Google Search Console page, go to the Sitemaps section. Then, enter your sitemap's URL into Add a new sitemap box and click Submit.
Now, you've finished submitting your sitemap to Google.
Step 3: Check If Your Website is Indexed
After submitting your website to Google, you should check whether your website is indexed or not.
To do it, you must go to the Google search and search with "site:(yourdomain.com)" texts.
For example, I enter site:gretathemes.com and this is the result:
If the result is like this, your website has been indexed by Google.
Otherwise, if SERP shows no result as the image below, it means that Google hasn't indexed your website yet. So you need to wait. After 1--2 days, if your website is still not indexed, you should submit it again.
Last Words
If you follow the above steps, you can submit your website to Google easily and quickly. It just takes you a few minutes but saves you a lot of precious time making your website to be displayed on SERP. Hopefully, in this way, your website can approach customers more quickly.
In addition to submitting your website when it's a new site, you can apply this way when you have any updates to make sure that Google index the new information.
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The publication at GretaThemes.
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