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In this article, Aleph Website explores what happens when you submit your website to a search engine. This is a very interesting question and many entrepreneurs and small business owners struggle to understand the importance of submitting a website domain and its sitemaps to search engines.
Let us unpack this question by first identifying what is a Website submission to begin with:
What is a Website Submission to Search engines?
If you’re creating a new website you will have to go through a few security and optimization steps to ensure your domain (and website thereof) is eligible for search engine results. Search Engines really like neatly and ordered pages, as well as secure pages. So what does this mean in practice?
Here’s a list of what your site must have prior to submission to search engines:
- HTTPS (Hypertext transfer protocol secure)
- SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
- SITEMAP (the site blueprint)
- SAFE HOSTING (e.g. Site Ground)
- PAGE BUILDER FILES (e.g. WordPress Files and Database)
- DNS (domain name system)
These are all important components for a site to be fully eligible to appear in search results. Not that you cannot appear if you are missing any of these, but it would affect your organic performance negatively.
Aleph Website strongly recommends hiring an expert web developer and designer to get your site up and running. Think about your site as a house. Make sure to set the RIGHT FOUNDATIONS so you can build up the stories. Without a strong and healthy base, you cannot build a good website.
A Castle built on quicksand is as good as a hut!
when you submit your website to a search engine it goes without saying that you have checked out all the fundamental steps and you’re ready to explore the world of organic performance.
Here is what happens when you submit your website to a search engine:
1. Uploaded Sitemaps
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is the blueprint of a website that contains the plan for your pages and they’re organized into buckets; defined by the type of content found on each of these pages. Sitemaps are HTML-based pages that are known as XML files. They’re not used by the user – they are supporting web files that help search engines understand the content of your site.
Examples of Uploaded Sitemaps
A News network such as BBC will have a sitemap that distinguishes content served to different countries (England, Wales, Ireland, and so on):
While a website dedicated to selling a specific product will have a different sitemap; one focused on categorizing products and services. A good example is Dicks Sporting Goods sitemap:
Uploaded Sitemaps to Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a powerful Search Engine tool. It can be leveraged for uploading Sitemaps to Google.
How do submitted sitemaps help Google?
Once you’ve submitted your sitemap to Google, you’ve completed a major step toward having a good organic performance.
Google will now use your sitemap and identify the keywords on your pages to rank you for categories that are relevant to your business. Google aspires to improve search results and ensure the user is finding exactly what he/she is looking for. So, the sitemap is the beginning of your web communications with Google.
2. Indexed Pages
What is page Indexation?
Page indexation is when a page you have published is crawled and qualified for search results by a search engine spider (e.g. Google Bot).
Think about the internet and web as a real spider web/net. Whenever something hits the web, the spider feels it is via the links of his web. The spider then crawls towards the catch and inspects what it is. If it is a fly, for example, it would wait some time and then wrap so it’s ready for consumption.
An indexed page is a wrapped fly!
What qualifies a page for indexation?
Google forces mobile-first pages. This means your site must be mobile-friendly. After that, the Google bot looks for coverage cues such as:
It also wants the page to have certain quality enhancements that help the page rank better:
Once you’ve checked out and the page was indexed, Google will give you the following notification:
Congratulations! Your page is indexed and now it appears as a search result for a specific set of keywords!
3. Getting Citations
Once your sitemap and pages are submitted, indexed, and populated, you’re now eligible for appearing on various citation websites that will help you and your business connect to the world web.
Some of the most popular citation websites are:
- Yelp
- Apple maps
- Google Business Profile
- Yellow Pages, etc.
How do citations help my website rank?
Citations link to your homepage, service page, and contact page, providing information that is crucial for search engines to understand what your business is about.
For example, the Services page may contain information that directly describes your business:
This information is then collected and sorted out on various websites linking to your pages using keywords from your own content:
These citations simply corroborate what’s already mentioned on your site. Doing that increases your chances to rank for what your content is about.
As you can see, citations are very important. Here at Aleph Website, we build citations for our clients using various tools, such as Bright Local.
4. Knowledge Graphs, Profiles, and Entities
OK. Sitemap is indexed, pages appear for search results, and Search Engines are learning about you more and more. What’s next?
The next step for Search Engines is to CREATE ENTITIES around your business, but also CONNECT you to EXISTING ENTITIES.
What is an Entity?
An Entity is a ‘Thing’ that has specific properties and attributes. It differs from keywords in that it describes what A THING is.
For example, if you search for ‘Pineapples’ you will NOT GET RESULTS for both apples and pines. Not at all! You will get the results for a specific type of fruit that is nothing like Pines or Apples. Google does it using entities!
Google uses entities to create knowledge graphs.
Google Business Profile as your knowledge Graph
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a platform that allows you to upload your information directly to Google. This platform is used for:
- Local Search Results (using Google Maps API)
- Branded Search & Brand-specific keywords
- Shopping feature for your products
- Google Search (traditional results)
As you can see, building the right knowledge graph is crucial and it all ties up together neatly to form a really good impression of your company on the web – connecting your site and pages through the appropriate links that are meaningful for your websites.
5. Filling your upper funnel with Keyword-sensitive Traffic
Finally! We’re almost done! When you submit your website to a search engine, you should track organic performance and stay on top of the keywords our business is ranking for. This is very important! You need to make sure you know what keywords your domain is ranking for, otherwise you might be attracting the wrong type of traffic.
Page conversions will entirely depend on the quality of the page, user experience, and your optimization (SEO) skills.
You can use various tools for organic traffic monitoring, we recommend using tools such as Google Search Console, Bing Webmasters Tool, and SEM Rush.
If you do it right, you will make major wins and get lots of traffic:
Getting 17,000 clicks in a single day is something worth examining and reverse engineering. This is what the best of the best do, and this is how you can dominate organic traffic sources!
When you submit your website to a search engine Make sure to go over these steps
To sum it up, these steps are crucial to ensure you have done it all when you submit your website to a search engine:
- Upload Sitemaps
- Index Pages
- Get Citations
- Create a Knowledge graph
- Track and monitor organic performance
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