How Do You Submit A Website To Google Search Console?

Story Based Question

You’ve just finished building a brand-new website for your business. You’re excited to start attracting visitors, but you know there’s one crucial step left to take: making sure Google knows about your site so it can appear in search results. You’ve heard of Google Search Console, but you’re not sure how to go about submitting your site to it. You think: How do I submit my website to Google Search Console and ensure it gets indexed?

Exact Answer

To submit your website to Google Search Console, verify your site ownership, then submit your sitemap through the platform to help Google crawl and index your site.

Explanation

Submitting your website to Google Search Console is a key step in getting your site noticed by Google. The process allows you to monitor how Google sees your site and ensures that your content can be indexed and ranked. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Set Up a Google Search Console Account: Before you can submit anything, you’ll need a Google Search Console account. You can sign in with your Google account and access the Search Console dashboard. If you don’t already have an account, creating one is quick and easy.
2. Verify Your Website Ownership: Google needs to know that you’re the owner of the website before it allows you to submit it. You can verify your ownership in several ways:
   • HTML file upload: Google provides a verification file that you upload to your site’s root directory.
   • HTML tag: You can add a special meta tag to your website’s homepage.
   • Google Analytics: If you already have Google Analytics set up on your site, you can verify ownership through that.
   • Domain name provider: Some domain providers offer an easy way to verify ownership directly through your domain.
3. Submit Your Sitemap: After you’ve verified your website, the next step is to submit your sitemap. A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your site, helping Google understand your site’s structure and content. Most content management systems (like WordPress) automatically generate a sitemap for you, but you can also use tools like Yoast SEO to generate one manually.
   • To submit your sitemap, go to the Sitemaps section in Google Search Console, enter the URL of your sitemap (usually something like yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml), and click Submit.
4. Monitor Your Site’s Performance: Once your site is submitted, Google will start crawling it and adding it to its index. You can monitor the status of your pages and see how they’re performing in search results by regularly checking your Google Search Console dashboard.

Example

Let’s say you’ve just launched an online clothing store. You’ve created the website, added product pages, and written a few blog posts. Now, you want to make sure that your store appears in Google’s search results when potential customers look for “affordable winter coats” or “best online stores for jackets.”

First, you sign up for Google Search Console using your Google account and then proceed to verify your website. You upload the HTML verification file that Google provided into the root folder of your website. Google verifies your site, and you’re all set to go.

Next, you make sure your site has a sitemap (many WordPress plugins do this for you), and you submit it in the Sitemaps section of Google Search Console. This helps Google understand the structure of your site, so it knows where to find all your product pages, blog posts, and other important content.

Over the next few days, you keep an eye on the Search Console dashboard to see how your pages are performing, which queries are driving traffic, and if there are any crawl issues. After a few weeks, you notice that several of your product pages are ranking higher for terms like “winter coats online,” and you feel confident that Google is now successfully crawling and indexing your store.

Submitting your website to Google Search Console is essential for helping Google discover and index your content. By verifying your ownership and submitting your sitemap, you ensure that your website is on Google’s radar and can start appearing in search results.