Site Submission to Google Search Console

How to submit your site to Google search console

The google search console is an essential SEO tool for webmasters that allows you to manage several critical aspects of SEO in one place. It presents reports to help you understand the indexation status of your website as well as your backlink profile.

When you start a new blog, it is a critical step to submit it to the Google search console. This will allow you to analyze several things in one place, including how google crawls your website, your backlink profile, highest ranking keywords and more factors. Armed with this information, you can work on improving your site SEO and making your content perform better.

As a first step to submit your website to Google Search console, you need to have a google account. Login to the google search console and then on the left sidebar Click on add new property.

In the second step, you are required to select the property type. You can either submit the root domain to the search console or the root domain and its www and non-www variants separately. To submit the root domain like example.com, you need to fill the root domain in the Domain section. For entering the www and non www versions of your website with http or https included, enter the details in the url prefix section.

Before you can start using the google search console, you will need to verify that you are the owner of the said domain. It will require you to verify the domain ownership either via the DNS or using other methods like a verification code or html file. The google recommended method is to do it through the DNS, where you will create a new TXT record and you are done.

To verify domain ownership using the DNS method, go to your domain registrar or DNS manager. For example, you might be using Godaddy or your host for managing DNS. Or you may be using cloudflare or another premium DNS provider like Route 53. Just login to your DNS account and then add a new txt record with the existing records.

Copy the txt records provided by Google and paste it in the value section of the record for both www and non www versions. Wait a few minutes and then go back to the google search console where you can click on verify now.

Once your domain ownership is verified, you can start using the google search console. However, apart from the DNS method to verify DNS ownership, there are more methods to verify that you are the owner of the domain.

Instead of submitting a domain property, you should try creating a url prefix property. For example, in the url prefix section, you can enter https://example.com or https://www.example.com and then submit. You can now verify your property using any of the several methods like uploading an html file to the root folder of your website or you can add the html meta tag provided by Google to verify domain ownership.

If you are using Yoast SEO plugin, it includes tools for inserting verification codes. Go to the tools section and enter the html tag provided by Google in the webmasters console section and save.

Otherwise, if you have the Google analytics code active on your website, use it for verification. Select the google analytics option and google will automatically verify domain ownership using the Google Analytics code. Please, select the proper option and then click on the verify now button. Once the domain verification process is completed, you will receive the message that you are the verified owner of that domain.

The Google Search Console may take a few days to a few weeks before it starts showing data related to indexation, keywords and backlinks. However, you must not forget to submit your sitemap to the Google Search Console, which is critical to the crawling of your website and indexation. A sitemap includes the urls that you want to be crawled and indexed by google.

If you are using the Wordpress CMS, you can easily generate a sitemap using an SEO plugin or a dedicated sitemap plugin. SEOm plugins like AIOSEO, Rank Math, Yoast and SEO framework all have the sitemap feature included. Please, copy the sitemap url and go to the google search console to submit it.

Once inside the search console, you can find the Sitemaps tab in the left sidebar. Click on it and then enter the sitemap url and submit. Now, Google will scan the sitemap and soon you will see the number of urls found inside the sitemap listed there. In this way, you can submit your sitemap to Google so that the urls to be indexed are crawled first.

After your site submission to Google search console is complete, you will need to wait for a few days to a few weeks for search console data to start appearing. A week or so later, you can check out the urls that are being indexed by google or the ones being left out because of being no-indexed or some other reason that might need fixing.

The google search console is a very important tool in terms of SEO. Apart from knowing url indexation status, you can use it to collect backlink data, keywords status, and keyword rankings. If you click on the search results tab and then view details, you will be able to see which keywords are getting the most impression and clicks and what is the average search position of keywords for your site. You can use this data to analyze keyword gaps and generate content that ranks better.

The Google search console also includes backlinks data and is better than any free online backlinks checker. You will be able to check out which sites are linking to your blog and which are the most linked pages. It will enable you to create content that is most popular among readers and which is frequently linked to by other authors.