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How to Make a Website Appear on Google
Having a beautiful website is one thing but having that website be found on page 1 of Google is likely to be far more important than how it looks. We see so many local and even national businesses reaching out to website design companies, paying substantial amounts for a site that has bells, whistles, and lots of other things they didn't ask for, only to discover months down the line that the website is nowhere to be seen when customers in their area are looking for the exact services they provide.
Why doesn't a website appear on Google?
There could be several reasons and some are more common than others. When a new website is launched, Google may just take time to notice it - or even care about it. A good web developer in London should know to immediately request indexing for a new website using Google Search Console.
Google Search Console
This is Google's platform that allows you to maintain your website's relationship with Google, let them know about your site's pages, sitemaps, and content. Google Search Console also allows Google to let you know if there are any issues with your site, so you can fix them and maintain a happy, health relationship with the world's most popular search engine (sorry Bing).
If your site needs to be registered with Google Search Console, your web developer should be able to do this with ease. There is a verification process that is fairly simple.
Social Media Platforms For Google Indexing
Another way to get your website to appear on Google is to post the URL on social media platforms. Google indexes these platforms fairly regularly and it may speed up the process of getting your site noticed. For best SEO practices, it is recommended to be active on your social media channels anyway - although the frequency of posts with URLs in should be limited. Find out more about Social Media Marketing here.
Website Indexing Turned On
A fairly rare but still problematic situation can arise if your website pages have been marked as "do-not-index". This is a method of stopping search engines from looking at certain pages on your site and displaying them in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). You may apply these to "Thanks" pages after someone fills out a form, as you wouldn't really want these showing up on Google, as it could affect your conversion rate tracking.
To find out if a page has been marked as no-index may require you to look at the code or back-end of the page but any good web developer should be able to do this for you. If your pages have been marked as no-index and you change it back, then that could be something to help your website appear on Google.
Great content to make a website appear on Google
If you want your website to appear on Google, you have to consider why the search engine would want to do that. What's Google's purpose? It's to show their users (the people putting in queries every day) the best possible websites to answer their questions.
That means, your website, in order to appear on page 1 of Google, needs to be one of the best 10 websites related to that specific phrase/question. When deciding who to show, Google will take into account a massive amount of factors and the content is going to be one of the most important. Does your website have information, text, images, and videos about the subject? Are you mentioning your location (if this is relevant) so that Google knows you are local to the user? Is your content tagged correctly? E.g. using heading tags, meta titles and descriptions etc.
If you need help with anything mentioned on this page, let us know. We would be happy to help. Learn more about our London SEO.