5 Essential Things To Do to SEO Your Domain

SEO is less of a dark art and more of knowing what to do to improve your chance of being ranked and found in the search results. One critical SEO process is ensuring you set up your domains in Google’s webmaster tools.

Changing your website in any way – adding a new domain, moving a site from subdomain to root, upgrading to SSL/HTTPS – means you need to help Google to find you properly.

I know I have been guilty of buying a domain, getting my website set up, feeling pleased with how the site looks and then … crickets. Sometimes it’s been months before I realised I wasn’t registering with Google at all. SEO practice includes helping Google out! This is one area of SEO that is a must for any website owner.

For these steps you need to have your Google Search Console and Google Analytics open.

1. 1. Add a property. Google sees each iteration of your domain as a separate entity so this process helps Google recognise all the versions available and ties them to your ownership. For each website you need to add four property versions:
      1. http://example.com
      2. http://www.example.com
      3. https://example.com (if you have an SSL certificate)
      4. https://www.example.com (if you have an SSL certificate)
   2. Next you need to ensure Google can find a sitemap to make it easier for its bots to crawl your site. Go to Search Console and select Crawl from the menu on the left then choose Sitemap. Add a sitemap address and test it to see if Google can find it and there are no issues, then hit submit.
   3. Again under Crawl, select Fetch as Google – once that occurs select ‘request indexing’
   4. Now tell Google which domain to render – go to the gear icon on the top right, choose Site Settings and select as appropriate
   5. Finally you need to connect your property in the Search Console to your Google Analytics tool so you get the SEO value.
      1. Head over to GA
      2. select the property you’re working on
      3. select the gear icon bottom left (admin)
      4. select ‘property settings’ then
      5. scroll down until you see ‘Search Console’
      6. click ‘adjust search console’. Make sure it records the right property version you want to collect analytics for eg https://example.com. If you see ‘none’ then click and choose the property to attach.

Whew!

At the end of that you will have set up your domain and properties for Google to find and track data. If you don’t do these steps your website will still work but it will be harder for Google to find you and you certainly won’t see any data to help you track and improve your SEO performance.

Further Reading:

Getting Indexed in The Search Engines

Setting Up SSL – The Full Story