There are many blogs started each day. People create blogs to write about what they love and share their opinion with the rest of the world and maybe make money when they monetize their traffic. Out of millions of blogs online not everyone of them is successful. For a blog to be successful you will need visitors because of no one can find it and visit it it’s like it does not exist.
Blog owners use many methods to promote their blogs, connect with their target audience and drive traffic. One of the best way to drive traffic is through search engines like Google and Bing. People use search Engines every day and if they find your blog in the search results they can visit your blog by clicking on a link. To drive traffic to your blog using search engines like Google and Bing your blog must be indexed or otherwise it will not appear in the search results. For your blog to be indexed search engine bot must first crawl your blog and add your website and it’s content to their index.
When the search engine bots crawl a certain website or blog the search engines become aware of it’s existence and they also index the webpages and add them to lists of webpages from the same category. Webpages are indexed and organized according to words and category to make it easier for people who use search engines to what exactly what they are looking for.
When people type words in the search box of Google or Bing the search engines go through their indexes to find the pages that are most relevant and displays the results. The readers can then click the link in the results page and they will visit the webpage. The more webpages from your blog are indexed by search engine the more traffic from the search engines you can expect. If you however made recent changes to your content after it was crawled by the bots then you have to wait for bots to crawl it and index it again for the search results to return the latest version of the webpage.
Step by step guide to have your blog crawled and indexed by search engines
So the question is how to get your wordpress blog indexed by the search engines? Here are some steps you can take for Google and Bing to index your blog.
- Check if your blog is indexed by search engines. First of all you should check if your site is indexed by Google and Bing. You can do that easily by typing site:www.yourdomain.com in the search box. If your blog is indexed that you will see webpages from your blog that are indexed by the search engine. This works for both Google and Bing. If your blog is not indexed than you should submit it for inclusion.
- Create original content. In order to search engines index your blog you need to have original content. Search engines love fresh and original content, and you will need to start writing and publishing blog posts that are original and optimized for search engines. When writing your blog content you must include relevant keywords preferably in the title, description and throughout the body of the article. You can use many keyword tools, some of them free to find the best keywords you can use in your content. Search engines like Google love fresh content and because of this you should publish new posts on your blog regularly. The more qulity and original content you publish the more frequently will bot crawl your blog and your webpages will be indexed.
- Create a sitemap of your blog. To get you blog indexed by search engines you will need to create a sitemap of your blog. Sitemap is a file with XML extension that has links to all the webpages of your blog. The good thing about Worpress is that there is a plugin called XML Sitemap Generator you can install. To create a sitemap of your Wordpress blog you need to install download and install XML Sitemap Generator and this plugin will create a sitemap of your blog. You will need your sitemap to submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing webmaster tools.
- Submit your site to Google. To submit your site to Google you should first log in to your Google webmaster tools account. If you have Gmail account you can use the same password and username to log in the webmasters account. Next you should type the url of you blog in the add site field and click continue. Then you should verify your ownership of the site by uploading HTML verification file or adding a verification meta tag to your blog and click verify. After verification process is complete you will need to add sitemap to Google. Sitemap helps search engine bot better crawl and index your blog. You should go to Site configuration/Sitemaps and click Add/Test Sitemap. Type the url of your wordpress blog sitemap yorsite.com/sitemap.xml in the text box and click Submit Sitemap.
- Submit your site to Bing. To add your site to Bing for inclusion is similar to submitting your blog to Google. You will need a Bing Webmamster Tools account so if you don’t have an account you should open one for free. To add your blog for inclusion sign in to Bing Webmaster tools account and type the url of your blog and the url of your sitemap XML. First you will need to add your site url and verify it by copying and pasting a tag in the default homepage. To submit your sitemap click on Crawl and then click on Sitemaps(XML,Atom, RSS),type the url of your sitemap in the box and click Submit.
- Wait few days and check if your blog is indexed by Google and Bing. To see if your blog is indexed type in the search box site:www.yourdomain.com. If your blog is indexed you will see links to the indexed webpages on your blog.
