Google Search Console is one of the most useful tool every webmaster should know and understand how it works. It is in Google Search Console that you submit your sitemap for google to crawl and access your content.
This tool is very important as it make google understand your pages and know how to rank them giving you in return some detailed analysis of your site's performance, your coverage issues and how people search your content on the web. Google Search Console equally provides any other detailed information of your blog on the internet and how Google crawls or not your content.
That is why it is important for every website to be submitted in Google Search Console in order to be discovered on the internet bringing you of course rich search traffic.
In our previous tutorials, we have discussed so much on Blogger and how to start your blog and make money in the right way. Check it out below.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
By the end of this article, you will know how to submit your website to Google Search Console for getting good search visits on your website.
What is Google Search Console?
Search Console is a free tool from Google that helps developers, website owners, and SEO professionals understand how their site is performing on Google Search.
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. You don't have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
How does Google Search Console Works?
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Google Search follows three basic steps which are Crawling, Indexing and Serving (Ranking your pages on search results).
Crawling
The first step is finding out what pages exist on the web. There isn't a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. Some pages are known because Google has already visited them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page. Still other pages are discovered when a website owner submits a list of pages (called sitemap) for Google to crawl. If you're using a managed web host, such as Wix or Blogger, they might tell Google to crawl any updated or new pages that you make.
Once Google discovers a page URL, it visits, or crawls, the page to find out what's on it. Google renders the page and analyzes both the text and non-text content and overall visual layout to decide where it should appear in Search results. The better that Google can understand your site, the better Google can match it to people who are searching the web for your content.
Indexing
After a page is discovered, Google tries to understand what the page is about. This process is called indexing. Google analyzes the content of the page, catalogs images and video files embedded on the page, and otherwise tries to understand the page. This information is stored in the Google index, a huge database stored in many, many (many!) computers.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Serving (Ranking)
When a user types a query, Google tries to find the most relevant answer from its index based on many factors. Google tries to determine the highest quality answers, and factor in other considerations that will provide the best user experience and most appropriate answer, by considering things such as the user's location, language, and device (desktop or phone). For example, searching for "blogger seo tricks" would show different answers to a user in a particular country than it will for a user searching from another country.
It can take Google days, weeks, or even months to index a page based on its accessibility and contents found on it.
Google understand elements of a page in different ways. For instance Google understands text on a page easier as compared to images and videos most especially when these ones don't carry title and alt text to show the images are related to the content. That is why it is important to optimize your in page or article SEO for Google to easily crawl and index it. We will equally cover a section on in page SEO so subscribe to our newsletter to be updated when it comes.
Submitting my Blog (website) XML Sitemap to Google Search Console
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Now that we have covered basic steps on Search Console, we can dive into our tutorial.
Submitting your site to Google is even very simple than the other tutorials we saw before.
As we previously mentioned, we advise you to get a custom domain name and link to your blogger blog. But for the sake of all in this tutorial, we will do this with our blogspot subdomain. Follow the steps below:
Step 1: Go to Google Search Console, Click Get Started and verify your domain ownership. You can equally enter your blogspot subdomain in the domain bar.
If you Sign Up with your Google account linked to your blog, then Google will be able to auto verify your domain. You can see on the image below that the property has been auto verified.
Step 2: Click on GO TO PROPERTY and you will be taken to your Search Console Dashboard as seen in the image below.
You will have broad set of options to deal with. When you just add your blog to Search Console, you won't be able to receive any data the moment. You will have to wait for few hours to view how your site performs.
In search console, you have Overview, Performance, URL Inspection, Coverage, Sitemaps, Removals. These are the main tools you will be dealing with.
Overview shows you how people search and click your content through the web.
Performance See how your pages are being shown as results and how they rank for results
URL Inspection to check any of your links if they are healthy and trying to fix them if they are having issues.
Coverage Where you see how Google Crawls your pages and what issue that hinders then from being indexed.
Sitemaps where you submit your XML Sitemaps for Google to crawl and index your pages.
Removals where you request for removal of your content from the web.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Step 3: We are interested in the Sitemap. So go to the Sitemaps tab and enter your sitemap. Note it should be entered in the format https://mywebsite.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml or https://mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml. See the below image for indications:
Ones that done, click on the blue Submit button and your sitemap will be submitted. Google will periodically check the website for new pages that can be indexed and add them on its list for search results.
You don't have to submit your site xml sitemap to Google Search because it won't change the way google scheduled to index your pages. Google checks every sitemap for new pages and index them whether you submit them or not.
Make sure you have some articles on your site before submitting your sitemap if not Google Search will report an error as you can see below.
If you have articles on your site, then, you will see a success in the place of error and Google Search will display the number of pages in discovered in that sitemap
Conclusion
We have seen what Google Search Engine is and how it works. We have equally seen how to submit your blog's xml sitemap to Google Search Console and how Google periodically indexes your pages.
So we solely advice you to submit your sitemap to google search in order to display your web contents to searcher on the web.
Below are some tutorials whiwh you must read in order to understand alot about blogging and SEO.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
-
We have covered that in this tutorial.
-
Blogger blog have sitemap.xml directory by default so no need for that.
-
If you are on blogger, you wouldn't need this.