Google Search Console is a Must for SEO

Understanding SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your website to be found on the internet is a must. You have to speak the language of the search engines for them to understand what people are looking for. That is what SEO does.

It helps you to speak that language.

It’s not enough to have a beautiful website. Unless you connect it to the world at large through search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo it not much good because no one will be able to find it.

Not only is SEO important for websites and blogs but all the social medias use it to some extent.

You will want to set up a Google Analytics account at some point and connect it to your WordPress website using a plugin.

I like MonsterInsites and the way it gives me easy to understand information about the traffic that is coming to my website.  

Google Search Console has tools to improve your website performance on Google and reports that help you to measure your website traffic, fix problems, and make your site look good on Google Search results.

I will show you how to do several things in this blog

Sitemaps from your website is what you will install into Google Search Console once you get it set up. I use Yoast SEO on all my WordPress websites. In this blog I will show you how to access those sitemaps and then how to install the maps into your console.

You will have to verify your website ownership in the DNS of the Domain Name provider.

When you have finished your SEO for each website and blog page, weather new or update old ones, you need to tell the search engines that you have new content or else it will take them a long time to crawl your pages to rank you.

When you update your sitemaps into Google Search Console you are telling Google to crawl or look over your website immediately. If you do not do this then it may take weeks for Google to do it on its own.

Once this process verifying is done you will not have to do it again. It’s not hard but easy to do.

Setting Up Google Search Console

First you will need to set up a Google Account if you do not have one.

Second you will have to set up the console by going to Google Search Console for your website. You can add more than one domain name if you wish.

Once you have the console setup you will need to verify it by adding your domain name.

The next step will be to verify your domain name.

There a couple of different ways of doing that but if you have access to your DNS file at the hosting site that is the best way to do it.

Copy the code and then we will go over to the DNS file where your domain name is located.

Where it says Type in the drop down menu, pick TXT.

On the host put @ and then the TXT Value past the code.

Then save.

You should then see the TXT subfile in the DNS file under google-site verification code.

Now go back to Google Search Console and Press Verify.

Most of the time you will be verified right away but not always.

Sometimes you have wait an hour or two, but it will go through.

If it it does not, after 24 hours repeat the process again or try an alternative method.

Without leaving Google Search Console, go to where your sitemaps are made on your website.

In this case, it is in my Yoast SEO tool.

Yoast makes a new sitemap every time you make a new webpage, landing page, blog, or when you make changes to older pages and blogs.

In the Yoast tool, go to the button called Features.

Now go down to where it says XML sitemaps and press the ? mark.

Then you will notice a sentence will appear on the right See the XML sitemap.

When you press that, it will then take you where your sitemaps are stored.

You will then want to copy the various sitemaps by starting with the most important one called sitemap_index.xml.

Others that are important to copy would be are post-sitemap.xml for your blogs, page-sitemap.xml for your website pages and landing pages, attachment-sitemap.xml for images, category-sitemap.xml for categories on your blog, tag-sitemap.xml for blog tags and author-sitemap.xml

You will now want to go back to Google Search Console.

Now paste each of the sitemaps one at a time where it says add a new sitemap.

You are adding the whole url sitemap.

Now press SUBMIT and it will add it to submitted sitemaps.

You will only have to do this procedure of adding sitemaps manually once and Google Search Console will update every couple of days on its own.

However, I like to go into the console and update these sitemaps manually after I have made new changes to different pages and blogs.

That way you are telling Google to crawl your website right away and show up on search engines faster.

It also gives me a chance to see what is going on in the console and see if there are some problems that need to be corrected.

There are many tools on the console that you should take advantage of. 

Google itself has teaching videos on how to use these tools and make your website and its SEO more efficient.

Go here to find out more about what we do with Google Analytics 

Google Search Console is a Must for SEO

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