In our last segment, we ended on a discouraging note. Without good SEO, search engines banish your website to the far reaches of the internet where sane men seldom travel.

Fear not, in this segment we will discuss some quick actions to get your website found.

You’ll also learn about Google Analytics and other ways to monitor your website’s performance.

Submit your website to Search Engines

Make sure search engines know about your website.

Don’t rely on chance where search engine submission is concerned. You can do everything right when you design your website, but if the search engines don’t index it, the site will remain undiscovered. We show you how to submit your website using a sitemap below.

Create a sitemap to Submit to Search Engines

A sitemap is a page that has an index of all the pages on your website.

(Like a Table of Contents).

Sitemaps help visitors and search engines find your content.

Most CMS (WordPress, WIXX, etc.) have tools to generate sitemaps.

Do a search, setup sitemap for WordPress, etc. to find instructions.

Once you create your sitemap, you’ll want to submit it to Google.

Google Webmasters Tools

To submit the sitemap you created previously, you must set up a Google account and Google Console.

Watch this video to set up the console and get started.

The video will walk you through setting up your google account, and three different methods to set up Google console. WordPress instructions using a plugin are toward the end of the video.

MINI GLOSSARY

WordPress: the most common CMS on the internet.

CMS: Content Management System.

Plugin: Extension that adds functionality to a website.

Add your Sitemap

From Google Search Console, navigate down to the sitemaps link on the left side of the page.

Click the link

In add a new sitemap box, enter your sitemap URL.

Submit.

You’ll receive the following message:

“Google will periodically process it and look for changes. You will be notified if anything goes wrong with it in the future.”

The status of your sitemap will show in the “submitted sitemaps” box.

Once it’s processed, it will show success in the status column.

Set up analytics

Another tool that Google offers to aid in your online success is analytics.

Analytics lets you view how many people are visiting your website, how they’re engaging, what pages they like, and more. Google Analytics is the most comprehensive way to track and understand what’s happening on your website.

Go here to sign up:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s easy to set up your account; the hardest part is putting the tracking code on your website.

The tracking code is used to track page visits, how long visits last, where people are coming from, and a lot of other stuff, too!

Google Analytics is not the only tool that you can use to track your SEO campaigns.

Google Search Console

Google search console is a great way to see site visits and keyword performance. With just a few clicks, you can see how well your SEO campaign is doing.

Website Performance

Find and click website performance on the left side of the screen.

Reading the Report

Clicks and impressions

Impressions: The number of times your website showed in search results.

Clicks: The number of times a website visitor selected your website in a search.

The chart shows data for three months. Don’t worry if you have very few results, it takes a little time for Google to keep track. If your website has been running for a while, you should have results.

Next there is some tabbed data:

Queries         Pages        Countries      Devices          Search Appearance       Dates

Click each of the tabs to see how your website is performing.

Queries: The number of clicks and impressions for each of your website keywords. The fruit of SEO labor ?

Pages: The number of clicks and impressions received on each page of your website.

Countries: Clicks and Impressions to your website by country.

Devices: Clicks and impressions separated by the type of device, mobile, tablet, or desktop.

Now that you have these nifty stats and you’re certain your website has the attention of Google, you might wonder what to do with all the information.

We’ll cover that in the next segment.