Connecting your website to Google Search Console helps Google find and index your pages. It also keeps Google up to date as you add, edit or remove content.
Search Console also reports on how your site appears in Google search results, which gives you useful insights for improving your website.
Before you start
Your website needs to be published and live on your domain before you can verify ownership. Google occasionally updates Search Console, so some screens and button names may look slightly different from the steps below.
Connect your site and submit your sitemap
Step 1: Sign in and add a property
Vai a https://search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google account. If you don't have one yet, create an account first. Then select Add property.
Step 2: Choose a property type
Choose how you want to connect your site:
- Domain covers your whole domain and is verified with a DNS record.
- URL prefix covers one specific address and can be verified with an HTML file upload, a meta tag, or other methods.
Step 3: Verify ownership
Follow the verification steps for the option you chose. See How to verify your domain for detailed instructions on each method.
Make sure your site is published so the verification file or code is live on your domain. You may need to come back in 15 minutes to select Verify in Search Console to confirm ownership.
Step 4: Submit your sitemap
Once your site is verified, select Sitemaps in the left sidebar. Enter sitemap.xml in the sitemap field and select Submit. Your full sitemap address will look like this:
https://www.yourdomain.co.nz/sitemap.xml
Google can take a little while to process your sitemap. Once it has, the Sitemaps page will show the status as Success. You may need to refresh the page.
Verifying Your Domain
For detailed steps on verifying your domain using the Domain option or URL Prefix option - see the link below:
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A link to a really good page explaining how Google search works, how crawling, indexing and serving results happens.
The basic strategy and process for approaching SEO on your website
The most important first step is to consider your keywords and key phrases.
The first sentence of your opening paragraph is the most likely to be read by new cutomers and is highly relevant.
Headings and Titles are significant to all search engines.
You can enter your Meta Title, keywords and description on a page by page basis.
DO enter keywords that you have used on your page. Do NOT enter Meta keywords that are not used on your page. If you want to add a new Meta keyword, then also add it to the content of your page.
Experienced users can get additional benefits from their SEO by tweaking the filenames of the website pages.
See an example for "lawn mowing, gardening and landscaping"
Incoming links are like referrals to your business. More referrals are a good thing, as are incoming links.
Use our Web Stats to monitor your traffic, and for search engine optimisation. See which other websites are giving hits to your website, which search engines are working, and which keywords people have used to find your website. Web Statistics come free with every domain you register and host with us. Learn more here.
You have two options; Update your pages content to be up to date or leave it as a final version. If you leave your content alone, it will rise back up the ranks. Read here for more SEO tips to do with time.
How can I add a search box to search within my own website?
Adwords is a way to get to the top of the google search engine results by paying per click. You will want to track the success of different campaigns.
You should not add dedicated conversion code to your website. Only the measurement ID is required to track conversions in the system.
Submit your website to as many directories and search engines as possible. The more used or relevant they are the better, so concentrate on these ones first.
We do provide Google Sitemap XML feature automatically. We also have an automatically generated public Sitemap on your websites. Learn about the Google site map in the "search engines" area on the left menu in the CMS.
Linking your domain and sitemap.xml file to a Google account will keep Google Search up to date with changes to your website, and provide insights into search results and behaviours via their search console.
Linking your domain and sitemap.xml file to a bing webmaster tools account will keep Bing up to date with changes to your website, and provide insights into search results and behaviours via their webmaster tools console.
There is no direct option to get your website sitemap linked with Duck Duck Go Search - As DDG anecdotally uses Bing for part of their search data you can look to add it to Bing Webmaster Tools
Most Google Search Console errors are nothing to be concerned about. Learn what some of the most common Google Search Console errors are and what they mean.
It will improve your SEO if you register your domain names for several years in advance. Squatters tend not to do that, so it sets you apart. It's also safer for your IP.
Search around for more information on the internet, as SEO best practices are always changing. Read some excellent information from Google here.
Provided you follow our guidelines for building your new site and changing your domain name to your new site, your search ranking will not only be preserved but will potentially increase.
Where to add alt-text to banners or images using the tinymce or drag-drop / contentbox editors
In the Drag-drop and Contentbox editors you can improve search engine / website performance by delaying the loading of images that do not appear in the viewable area on page load.
In the Drag-drop and Contentbox editors you can apply a fetchpriority attribute to images.
Learn how to add social networking links to your website.
It is hard to keep pages and files completely private from Google and other search engines. Here are a few guidelines and disclaimers.
You can set a redirect for any page to another via the SEO > FILE REDIRECTS area. This is handy for when you have migrated your website and want to redirect old google search results or have deleted a page and need to redirect.
Sometimes you may want a product to not appear in search engines or shopping feeds. This can help control which products are visible to the public or appear in marketing channels.
If you need to make changes to your robots.txt file you can do so via the SEO area of the CMS
There is an option to load many of the JS scripts at the bottom of the page.
If your URL appears to have numbers in it, but there is not yet a filename next to the page, category or product in the SEO area of the CMS, then we advise against redirecting these URLS.
You can update your filenames and meta titles in bulk via the SEO area.
You can override the system defined schema for any page via the Page Options tab.
You can further define the default JSON Schema for your Ecommerce Pages via the SEO > Schema Definitions area.
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