Indexing

If you have just launched a new website, or are about to, it is important that you tell Google this. If Google does not index your website, you are as good as invisible. You will not appear on any kind of searches in Google search results, and you will not get any organic traffic or similar.

It is critical – and therefore this must be under control from the start. If there is not, it must be discovered as early as possible so that you ensure that potential customers can find you on relevant searches. There are different ways you can check if Google is indexing your website. I will touch on some of them below.

Check if your website is indexed in Google

Does a site search?

An easy and quick way to check whether your page is indexed by Google is via a site search. In Google’s search field, type site: yourdomain.dk (e.g. site: learnfella.com). If your website is indexed, you would now like to see results from your website in the search results. If your pages come up in site search, but not on page 1 in Google, it is your SEO work with keywords, content etc. that you need to optimize.

If, on the other hand, there are no results from your site search, or perhaps just too few, there is probably something technically wrong. Via Google Search Console, you can check whether your pages are being indexed or whether problems have been identified. You can also submit a sitemap here, which nudges Google to open its eyes to your site.

You cannot always count on finding a direct cause of the indexing problem in Google Search Console. However, there are a number of things you can check yourself.

Check for No index

If you have found that your website is not indexed, it is a good idea to start by checking if your entire website is accidentally set to “no index”. No index is a small code that you can insert on the entire website (or individual subpages) that tells Google that they may not include these in their index. It can be a good thing on pages with personally sensitive content or on internal pages (e.g. intranet for companies, dealer pages and the like), but not on the entire website.

If you have a Word Press website, you can under the ‘Settings → Reading’ check if the box “Ask search engines not to index this website” is unchecked. If there is, you must hurry to remove this.

No index can also be inserted directly into the code. You can investigate this by looking directly at the code behind the website and searching for “no index” via the search function. It’s easy – even if you’re not used to working with code.

Remove crawl blocks in the Robots.txt file

In addition to no index, there are also potential crawl blocks in the so-called robots.txt file. To check whether you have a robots.txt file and whether there is something blocking it, you must go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt – for example https://learnfella.com/robots.txt. In this file, look for the following:

If you find one of these variants in your robots.txt file, it means in both cases that Google is not allowed to crawl (read) any of the pages on your website. You solve this – quite simply – by removing these from your file.

If you suspect that ‘disallow’ could have been set on just a single landing page, you can enter the URL in Google Search Console in “Investigation of web address” and get an answer to this.

Submit a sitemap via Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an almost indispensable tool if you work with SEO – and it’s free! If you would like to try to nudge Google to crawl and index your website, you can do this by uploading a sitemap under “Index → sitemaps” in Google Search Console.

In some CMS systems, a dynamic XML sitemap is automatically generated, while in other cases you have to create one of the other paths yourself. You can benefit from help with this part, so you can ensure that the sitemap is generated correctly, contains the correct information, and is automatically updated when you add and remove items or categories.

Mobile-friendliness

In the vast majority of cases , the majority of traffic to a website comes from mobile devices. In addition, Google follows the “Mobile First” principle when indexing websites. This means that it is the mobile version of your website that they store in their index, and it is therefore also this version that your rankings and more are created on the basis.

If you do not have mobile-friendliness under control, you risk that your page will not be indexed by Google, as pages that are mobile will be indexed first. When you work with website optimization, it is therefore important that you always check the mobile version of your website – so you are sure that people from mobile devices can use it a problem- and frustration-free. In this way, you also reduce the chance that people will “bounce”, i.e. leave the page almost as soon as they have entered.

In connection with mobile-friendliness, it is our clear recommendation that you use a responsive website design. This means that the design itself adapts to different screen sizes, and you therefore avoid having to maintain several different versions of your website.

Speed optimization

Whether your page loads slowly can be difficult to answer unequivocally, as it depends, among other things, on internet speed, the device you access the page from, and whether you have previously visited the page in question. However, one thing is certain: If you are working on optimizing your website for Google, you must ensure that it loads quickly. Ideally, your page should load within 3 seconds – unless you run a web shop, because here the recommendation is 2 seconds. However, it does absolutely nothing if your website loads in no more than 1 second, as it gives the user a good and fast experience that reduces the chance that they will leave the page quickly again. A slow page annoys the user, and usability is a huge factor for Google when ranking websites.

Many things come into play in terms of speed optimization, but even very small things can have a huge impact on the overall load time that your site has. Some things that have an influence on this are e.g. the amount of data that must be loaded – that is, how much your site “takes up”. The way in which the code from which your website is created is structured is also important. Therefore, in most cases, you must look at reducing the size of e.g. images, videos and the like, as well as get its developer to optimize the code as much as possible.

If you use Word Press/Woo commerce, the number of plugins and the theme you have installed also have something to say. Some plugins will slow down your website, while some themes contain a lot of redundant code.

You can create an overview of your website’s speed via a tool such as Page Speed Insights. However, you should be aware that it is not the actual score your website gets that you should get too hung up on. It is more the potential optimization opportunities that may appear that you or your developer must deal with.

User Experience (UX)

Another step in creating an SEO friendly website is about user experience, or UX as it is also called. Here the focus is on the overall experience the user gets from your website. A good first impression is just as important online as it is in real life. It is based on this that the user either continues his buying journey, or makes the decision to simply quickly leave the website again.

UX covers everything from the visual aspect of your website, to speed, credibility and much more. The overall experience when visiting your website must be good. It must be easy for the user to find what they are looking for or what you want them to find. The page must load quickly, all elements must work, and generally there must be as few distractions as possible. The less frustrated the user becomes, the greater the chance that they will stay on the page longer.

What is most important for the UX of your particular website depends a lot on its purpose. For some websites, the visuals are most important – how the website is designed, which visual elements are used (video, images, animations etc.). For others, simplicity and accessibility are the absolute most important things – find what’s most important easily and quickly. When you work with UX and an SEO-friendly website in general, you must therefore always have your target audience in mind – because it is they who must think your website is good and easy to navigate around.

Conversion optimization

Conversion optimization is about optimizing your website to get the user to take a desired action. For most B2C web shops, it is, for example, about purchases and signing up for newsletters. For B2B websites, it is typically calls or filling out contact forms that are important.

However, it is important to mention that it is quite natural that a large part of those who visit your website do not convert – i.e. take the desired action. However, that just makes it even more important to work precisely with conversion optimization, to make it even easier and more attractive for users to lead the conversion to the target.

Very small things like changing the color of an important button, more Call To Actions on the pages, a well-placed phone number and the like can help increase the conversion rate significantly. You can easily stare blindly at your own website and feel that it all makes sense. Therefore, it may be a good idea to get a few users who have not previously visited the site to look at it “with new eyes”. It can be an extremely valuable link in conversion optimization.

Content optimization

A large and important factor that Google places a high value on when ranking websites is content. They are constantly trying to deliver the best possible content to their users. Therefore, there are two huge advantages to content optimization: You give the user a good experience, via relevant content that matches what they are looking for. When users are happy, Google is happy, and when Google is happy, they rank the page better. Content must be qualitative – but how does it become so?

The absolute most important thing when it comes to content is that it must be relevant – that is, match exactly the user’s search intent . The quality of the content is also of great importance, and in general, content and the authority behind those who publish the content is something Google focuses more and more on in their algorithm updates.

To create an overview of your content and what the intention is behind each one, you can advantageously do a keyword analysis. This will give a concrete picture of what content you currently have. has which keyword(s) it covers and which landing page it is. At the same time, it also provides an overview of content and search intentions that are relevant, but which you currently do not cover.