How to make your web pages appear in Google Search results
A guide on using Google Search Console to add your web pages in Google Search results
Thursday, February 17, 2022
Table of Contents
Introduction
Why do we even care about making our web pages visible on Google?
Even though there are other search engines out there, At of the time of this writing, Google still has a 91.9% search engine market share. Here's the latest data.
With Google's search engine still dominating the market, it's essential to make sure that your web pages are visible in its search results to reach more users. For others, more users reached means more money.
I used a dummy website I created from one of my blogs for my example. Initially, I could not see it in Google's search results even if I specifically searched for the domain using this search value site:codegino.vercel.app.
This blog contains two main steps to show your web page in Google's search results:
- First, web admins must verify ownership of the web page
- Second, web admins must index the web page
Prerequisite: Make sure your website is SEO friendly
Before attempting to make your web page visible on Google Search, make sure it's optimized for search engines. SEO is no magic; There are a set of rules that you can follow to help your web page appear in any search engine.
Check this SEO cheatsheet
If you're not sure whether your website is SEO friendly, you can check this tool.
First step: Verify website ownership in Google Search Console
Actually, verifying your website ownership in Google Search Console is not necessary. A webpage can still appear in Google's search results if the content is excellent. Although, we won't know when it will show.
It would be best to have complete control here; plus, there are other features that you can use once you become the owner of the website. We don't want to wait for a month or a year for our content to be visible in Google's search results.
So let's start by verifying that we're the website owner by going to Google Search Console.
Click on Start now to sign in. Login using your Google account Or Create a new one if you don't have any.
After logging in, you'll be redirected to the Search Console dashboard. If the account is newly created, you'll be asked to set up a verification method.
Verification using domain
For the first option, you can use a domain to verify ownership. In my case, I can enter the domain codegino.vercel.app and click on the continue button.
After clicking the continue button, you'll be asked to verify the ownership of the domain.
TBH, the steps provided by Google are pretty straightforward, so I'll skip the explanation.
Here are samples of adding the value above to your DNS configuration.
Verification using URL prefix
You can use URL prefixes to verify ownership for the second verification option. In my case, I entered the URL prefix https://codegino.vercel.app and click on the continue button.
For this blog post, I chose the second type of verification.
After clicking the continue button, you'll be asked how you prefer to verify the ownership of the URL prefix.
Their recommended option simply states that you copy-paste the downloaded file to the public directory together with theindex.html.
For the other URL prefix verification methods, I believe they are well documented; simply go to the Full details link for more information.
NOTE: Before clicking the VERIFY button, do not forget to redeploy if your verification method includes adding/modifying something in your codebase.
Hopefully, your ownership is verified, and you should be seeing something like this.
Second step: Index the page you want to appear in Google Search
You're now ready to start adding your pages to Google's search results.
- Click
URL Inspection - On the focused input, enter the URL of the page you want to index.
- Click
REQUEST INDEXING
If everything goes well, you should be able to see the following message.
Test the web page in Google Search
This won't be instant. It took me around 24 hours to see my page appear in Google's search results.
After Google is done indexing your page, you can test it in Google's search engine.
Same as before, I explicitly searched for site:codegino.vercel.app; but this time, I can see my page in the search results!
Conlusion
Since Google is still the most popular search engine, it's essential to ensure that your web page will show in Google's search results. Using Google Search Console can help with this task easier. It is pretty simple to index a page using the tool; the problem is waiting for the indexing to finish. If you have any idea how to make it faster, please let me know.
What's next?
Congratulations! We've made our website visible in Google's search results. However, we need to increase the page ranking. Chances are newly added page will not be on the first page of the search result. As the saying goes, "The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is Page Two of Google".