You’ve spent time writing a high quality article, ensuring it’s SEO-optimized, and you’ve published it, so now it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for Google to index it so you can receive traffic right?
Not so.
Everyone has particularly had a problem in the past year with indexing, due to the sheer amount of content being produced, since the advent of AI writing tools. This unfortunately has created a deluge of low quality pages which Google has to sift through to find the good ones.
However, in this article we’ll run through some tips on how you can maximize your chances of getting all of your articles indexed – so those pages can start attracting the visitors that they deserve…
Why is Indexing Important?
We have touched on this – but ensuring a page gets indexed by Google, is essential if you want that article to be found on Google.
Without it, it’ll massively reduce the amount of people finding the article.
The less people that find your content, the less on-page user interaction (which itself is a Google ranking factor), and the less people will subsequently share, and naturally link to your content. So getting pages indexed is even more important than you may realize.
5 Quick Tips to Get Your Page Indexed
So now that you know the benefits of getting your articles indexed – what do you do when something isn’t indexed and is just not being picked up by Google naturally?
Here’s 5 ways to accelerate the indexing process.
Optimize Meta Tags
Meta Description: Write a concise, engaging meta description (150-160 characters) that summarizes the article’s content and includes the primary keyword.
Optimize Images and Alt Text
Image Size: Compress or resize images to reduce loading times without compromising quality.
Alt Text: Add descriptive alt text to all images, including relevant keywords. This helps with image indexing and improves accessibility.
Submit an XML Sitemap
Create a Sitemap: If your site doesn’t already have one, create an XML sitemap. This file lists all the pages on your site, helping Google crawl and index them.
Submit to Google Search Console: Submit your sitemap via Google Search Console to ensure Google is aware of all your pages.
Submit that specific page for indexing
Go into Google Search console, and the “Inspect a page URL” section. Place that article URL in here.
If the URL status starts with “URL is on Google”, then the page should be available in Google Search. But if you see the “URL is not on Google” status, that means the inspected URL isn’t indexed.
You’ll probably see the reason why the page hasn’t been indexed. And you’ll need to address the issue. In some cases though, there are no issues and it’s just because it’s a new page. Either way, you can request indexing by clicking the “Request Indexing” link.
Point Internal Links at the Page
Of course you want to make sure the link is relevant and the context is there. So for example, if you have an article like “A Guide to TikTok Marketing in 2024” – then you can run a search on your site for another article that talks about that topic.
Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can help here, but even without those tools it’s easy to find a good example. Just take a phrase or keyword which aligns with the target topic and put it into Google. (try it with double quotes and without)
This could then be a prime example of a blog post where you can insert a link to that page you want to get indexed. It’s also a good idea to find multiple internal link opportunities as well.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has shed some light on how you can get a page indexed. Of course, its no substitute for overall good SEO practice, and ensuring your website is structured well.
But even when you have taken care of that, you may need to give individual pages a nudge every now and again.
