How to index a WordPress site

To give more visibility to your business, you have decided to create a website with WordPress, the famous CMS that allows anyone to create a site from scratch and take care of its contents with ease. Unfortunately, however, a few weeks after going online, you realized that there is no trace of your site on search engines: for this reason, you would like my help to index your content and learn about the activities to be carried out. to improve its positioning.

That’s the way it is, right? So let me tell you that today is your lucky day. In the next paragraphs of this guide, in fact, I will explain how to index a WordPress site by providing you with all the necessary information to make your website visible in the eyes of search engines. Furthermore, it will be my job to provide you with some useful tips that you can put into practice to try to increase the visibility of the contents.

How do you say? Is that exactly what you wanted to know? So let’s not dwell further and get to the heart of this tutorial. All you have to do is set aside five minutes of free time and dedicate yourself to reading the next few lines. By doing so, I am sure that you will be able to index your website and, in the long run, also improve its position on the search engine results page. Happy reading and good luck for everything!

Index

• Differences between indexing and positioning
• How to index a WordPress site on Google
• How to rank a WordPress site on Google
• How to block WordPress site indexing

Differences between indexing and positioning

Before getting to the heart of this guide and explaining how to index a WordPress site, it might be useful to know what it means to index a website and what are the differences between indexing and positioning on search engines.

First of all, you must know that indexing a website means making it appear in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), that is, in the search results page. In simple terms, indexing is a procedure, which is usually done automatically as soon as the website goes online. Simply put, robots (also called crawlers or spiders), i.e. software that analyzes the contents of a website automatically on behalf of search engines, have access to the pages of the site and can scan the contents in order to position them on the search results pages for certain keywords. In rare cases, the procedure does not take place automatically and you can “suggest” directly to Google or other search engines to index a site.

And what does search engine positioning mean instead? By positioning we mean the position that the pages of your website occupy in the SERP, that is, in the results of searches made by users. Having a well-positioned site means appearing among the first search results for certain keywords searched by users and, therefore, increasing traffic in terms of visits and, depending on the type of website, increasing conversions (eg purchase of products on an e-commerce ) and/or earnings through direct advertisements (e.g. with Google AdSense ). Is everything clear so far? Well, then let’s take action.

How to index a WordPress site on Google

As just mentioned, the Google robot (called Googlebot ) constantly scans the Net looking for new websites and new content to index. Therefore, indexing a WordPress site on Google should be a fully automatic operation.

However, to make it easier for the robot to crawl your site and allow its contents to be indexed, it is useful to create an XML Sitemap, i.e. a file that collects all the URLs of the Internet site, which must subsequently be sent to Google via the Search Console. , an online and completely free tool that allows you to monitor the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your website.

To create an XML Sitemap on WordPress, you can use XML Sitemap: a free plugin that also allows you to automatically report new published content to search engines (not only Google but also Bing, Yahoo and Ask ).

To install this plugin and automatically create your XML Sitemap, go to the WordPress Plugins section and click on the Add New button located at the top. In the new screen that appears, type “XML Sitemap” in the Search plugin in progress field and, in the search results, click on the Install Now and Activate buttons for the plugin in question. In case of problems, I leave you to my guide on how to use WordPress in which you can also find directions to install and activate new plugins.

At this point, the XML Sitemap will be generated automatically and will be sent to Google and other search engines on the first update of an existing content or the publication of a new article or page. Alternatively, you can submit it manually by accessing the Settings and XML Sitemap sections and clicking on your sitemap item visible next to the Notify Search Engines about item.

Once this is done, write down the URL of your XML Sitemap that you can see next to The URL to your sitemap index file is as you will need it to communicate the XML file in question to Google.

To do this, connected to the main page of Google Search Console, click on the Start now button and log in with your Google account. In the new screen displayed, select the Domain option, enter the address of your website in the example.com field, press the Continue button and follow the instructions shown on the screen, to verify that you are the owner of the website in question.

Once this is done, select the Sitemap option located in the left sidebar, locate the Add a new Sitemap box, enter the relative URL of your XML Sitemap (i.e. the part of the address that follows the domain extension), paste it in the field Enter the Sitemap URL and click the Submit button – the Sitemap sent message will confirm that your website’s XML Sitemap has been submitted successfully.

At this point, indexing your content is only a matter of time. To check if your website is indexed on Google, connected to the main page of the search engine, enter the command site: nomesito. [Extension] (eg site: aranzulla.it ) in the search field and press the Enter key of the keyboard. Alternatively, by typing the command site: sitename. [Extension] / pagename, you can check the indexing of a specific page on your website.

Finally, I want to underline that there are several plugins that allow you to create the XML Sitemap, including those that allow you to implement useful features from an SEO perspective (eg. Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, etc.): if you use one of these plugins, make sure that you have disabled the option to create the XML sitemap or, alternatively, do not use additional plugins to create it. To find out more, I leave you to my guide on how to create a sitemap.

How to rank a WordPress site on Google

Unlike indexing, positioning a WordPress site on Google is a process that can take months or even years (if you have authoritative competitors) and that requires constant work on the content published and to be published.

A valid method to try to position your website in the first results of the Google SERP is to rely on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) , the set of all the optimization activities of a website aimed at improving its position on the search engines. research and, consequently, increase its visibility.

The first activity I recommend you to carry out is in-depth keyword research through which you can identify the best keywords (i.e. those with a greater search volume and at the same time with less competitiveness) to use to create new pages or articles. To do this, you can rely on free tools such as Ubersuggest or Google Trends (in this case, my tutorial on how to use Google Trends might be useful ) or choose to use paid tools (eg SEOzoom ) that also allow you to carry out an in-depth competitor analysis.

The latter is another important activity that I recommend you to carry out to know which websites in your same sector are currently in the top positions of Google and which allows you to find out what their strengths are and which techniques they have put into practice to be reputed to be authoritative in the eyes of Google.

After identifying which keywords related to the topic covered by your website are that have a decent search volume and low competitiveness, start creating content by putting the reader first and not the search engines: divide, then, paragraph content, uses header tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.) and, when necessary, creates bulleted or numbered lists that make it easier to read.

Although it is important to offer detailed content that meets the needs of the reader, perhaps including those that only related searches with respect to the main search key, keep in mind that a long content no longer has the possibility to position itself compared to a shorter article: avoid, therefore, to write forcibly only to lengthen the content.

How do you say? Is writing valuable content enough to rank on Google? The quality of the content is certainly one of the most important factors to get the top positions on search engines but you must know that Google takes into account over 200 factors (e.g. site speed, user experience, optimization for mobile devices, etc.) to decide which websites deserve to be in the top positions of the SERP.

Among these there is certainly the authority of a website which is also determined by the incoming links. If your content is valuable, I assure you that you will be able to receive links from other websites in a completely spontaneous way but you must know that there are also different strategies for obtaining links from authoritative sites. In this regard, my guide on how to do link building may be useful.

Finally, if you are just starting out in the world of SEO, I recommend that you read the introductory guide to search engine optimization and the instructions for webmasters from Google, in order to become familiar with the activity of optimization. In addition, you can also take a look at my guide on how to be on the first page on Google in which you will find some useful tips to position your website on the famous search engine.

How to block WordPress site indexing

If for any reason you need to block the indexing of a WordPress site, you should know that you can do it directly from the administration panel of the famous CMS.

To proceed, access the WordPress Dashboard of the website you intend to de-index, click on the Settings item in the left sidebar and select the Read option. In the new screen that appears, locate the Visibility to search engines section, put the check mark next to the item Discourage search engines from indexing this site and click on the Save changes button to save the new settings.

Alternatively, you can also proceed manually by editing the robot.txt file, a simple text file that contains information and instructions readable by search engines, so that the latter are able to understand which pages of your website they can scan.

To modify the file in question, which is located in the directory of your webspace, you can use one of the FTP programs (eg FileZilla ) that allow you to create a connection with the server hosting your website and upload/download files from the latter.

After retrieving the robot.txt file, all you have to do is insert the User-agent: \ * and Disallow: / commands on two consecutive lines and save the changes.