Having a website is not easy. Getting your website high in the search engines is even more difficult! However, there are a lot of tools available online. In this blog I discuss the free Google Search Console tools. Google Search Console is a true goldmine for anyone with a website. But guess what? Most website owners do not know what Google Search Console is.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console, formerly called Google Webmaster
Tools, is one of the most unknown but powerful tools you can use to prepare
your website for the search engines. Through this tool, Google communicates
with webmasters and, in addition to some useful settings, helps them discover
problems with their website. The great thing about this tool: it's free and
super simple. So get started!
5 things you can arrange right away
in Google Search Console
You can arrange many things in the Search Console. Some
things are easier than others. Here I discuss 5 things you can get started with
right away.
Manage Sitelinks
Have you ever wondered where those little links below your
main search result come from? These are so-called sitelinks. The good news is
you can manage these links. The bad news is that at the moment you can only “demote”
links, or put them down (veto). At the moment you cannot add links yourself -
Google checks which results are most relevant to visitors. However, if there
are pages that you would rather not see, you can send Google a signal that
these pages are not that interesting for visitors.
Upload your sitemap
You have done your best to make your website as clear as
possible and build as clean as possible. But unfortunately, Google isn't
perfect either, so the bots won't always understand where to find something.
Help the Google bots find the information you provide by adding your sitemap.
A sitemap is simply an organized list of all the pages of a
website that helps search engine bots better understand how to crawl your
website. The sitemap may also contain metadata about the pages, such as when it
was last changed or how important the page is relative to other pages.
A small website in which all pages are internally linked is
easy to search for Google. But large websites with pages that are not directly
linked together are too unclear. Adding a sitemap can certainly help your
search results in this case. A sitemap is certainly not an unnecessary luxury
for new websites that do not yet have external links.
The location of your audience
Are you already doing business across the border? Then your
website can probably be found in several languages. If you have local domains,
such as .au or .uk, Google will immediately understand which region or language
you are connected to. But if you have a generic domain such as .com, .org or as
is popular nowadays .io, then it is important to take some extra steps. For
example, if you have a generic domain name, you can enter this in Search
Console.
For example, if you serve several countries in 1 language,
this is not recommended. It is then important to set up your website properly,
for example by means of Hreflang tags. With these tags you explain to Google
for which language, country or region this page is intended.
The image above shows that no hreflang tags have been added
to the pages of the website yet. If this is the case, the total is shown here,
how many pages per tag and whether errors were found on the pages.
Crawl frequency
Are you someone who often updates their website, for example
by updating your blog? Then of course you also hope that Google often comes by
to see what's new! From some websites it seems like Google comes by every day,
no matter what you search for, they are always at the top with new content. It
probably is! Unfortunately, you cannot tell Google how often the bots should
come by - this is determined by algorithms. If it happens that your site
becomes slow because the bots crawl too often and too many pages, you can
submit a request to crawl less often.
Links to your website
Have you always been looking for a tool that really tells
you exactly where and how many backlinks you have managed to create to your
website? Why not just ask the search engine master himself - Google! In Search
Console you can see how many links there are to your site, where they come from
and what your most successful content is.
Finally
Google Search Console cannot create extra backlinks, cannot get you to page 1 in Google within a week and certainly cannot make your website function better. However, this tool can help you take the first steps and put the finishing touches. Take the time to add your websites and see what data you come across. There is a good chance that you will encounter things that you did not know before. Good luck!
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