Google provides several excellent tools to help you measure, monitor, and advertise your site. One fundamental tool is called Search Console. Getting started with Search Console is easy to do and helps get your site registered with Google so they are more likely to include your site in search results. Today we will look at registering your site and some ways you can customize how Google sees and displays your site.
Register with Search Console
The first step is to register your site with Search Console. You can get started by clicking this link and then selecting the Search Console option. You will be taken to the dashboard and you can add a site via the “add property” button. Then simply enter your site address and follow the instructions to verify that you own the site. You will need to be able to download and copy a file to your site for this verification process. Once that is complete you will be taken to your site dashboard. This whole process takes minutes but is your first step towards leveraging Google to drive traffic to your site.
Search Console Dashboard
Registration triggers the creation of a welcome message. Select the messages menu item to review this message. The message outlines a series of steps to customize your experience and improve your search presence. Go ahead and follow these steps to get your site fully registered. Note that Google likes to register every version of your site and considers http://yoursite as a different version than https://yoursite. This is important when you get to the sitemap step as well.
Generate a sitemap for both the HTTP and the HTTPS addresses of your site. A free sitemap generator like https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ makes this a quick and easy process. There are a number of free options and they work great for small sites. If you have hundreds of pages on your site, you will need to find a commercial version.
The Crawl Menu Options
Walk through the initial steps in your message from Google. This takes several minutes, at least, and turns on important tracking features within Google. In particular, the upload of a sitemap can take hours so you may have to come back the next day to see useful information. Start by clicking on the “Sitemaps” option. This opens a page with a graph and details about your uploaded sitemap. Review the issues found for your sitemap if any. You should see a number for submitted and one for indexed. Do not be surprised if you do not have all of your pages indexed. Google is smart about how it indexes pages so a multi-page article will only be indexed once.
Review the issues found for your sitemap if any. Note there is a column with a number for submitted and one for indexed. Do not be surprised if you do not have all of your pages indexed. Google is smart about how it indexes pages so a multi-page article will only be indexed once. Google also avoids indexing non-content pages like CSS and javascript source files.
Now move on to the “Fetch As Google” option. This tool allows you to view a page as Google does. As a best practice, always test your site pages from multiple browsers. However, this tool helps you see any issues Google runs into while crawling your site. A test done via a web browser will not always provide the same results as a web crawler like Google.
Finally, check out the crawl errors menu item. This will show you issues Google found crawling your site. Sometimes this is understandable due to secure pages, but often this will point out corrupt pages or broken links.
Follow The Guides
The Search Appearance and Search Traffic menu options include excellent tutorials and videos. The tutorials describe how to use these menus as your site history grows. At this point, you have registered your site and can move on to other tasks. However, the time you spend reviewing the tutorials and learning how to master the other menu options is well spent. You can also check out one of these low-cost guides to advance your knowledge of the search console and how to master it.
Google Webmaster Tools for beginners (Practical SEO Book 3)
Introduction to SEO with Google Webmaster Tools: An Unofficial Guide for Google Search Console
Your journey into the world of SEO is just beginning. The width and depth of tools available from Google may seem intimidating, but they are not hard to learn. Even better, the pay-off for learning these tools can make the difference between ending up on page 1 or some later page of search results. We all know how often people visit a page beyond the first for search results don’t we?
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