Nobody can find your website yet
After putting many hours into building the perfect website for your business, you finally publish it. It’s out there for the world to find! Or is it?
You slowly realize that no one will ever see your beautiful site unless you pay for ads or make lots of social media content that sends people to it. And while at some point you should definitely do those things, don’t people find some websites more organically?
Yes they do! Through searching directly on Google, Bing (and now also through ChatGPT and other AI chat bots) This article will explain very simply what needs to happen so your site can get some of that wonderful organic traffic, too.
Google discovers your web pages through crawling
Your website is made up of one or more web pages (a landing page, an about, a services page, etc.). Every page can have links, directing people to other pages in your website or to someone else’s site. This is the essence of the Internet! It’s literally a “web” of all the interconnected pages that exist in the world.
The process of making webpages available
- Find a new page
- Save it
- Show it to people searching
In this article, we will focus on step one: finding pages.
Search engines find new pages by “crawling” the web. This simply means that they scan one page to find all its links, then visit each linked page and repeat the process. Just like a spider “crawling” a spider web. Google is the leading company at making search software. Their “spider” algorithm is called Googlebot.
How to help search engines find your brand new webpage
Backlinks
The most common method for Google (or another search engine) find out you have a new webpage published is for a well-known page to link to it. This is called a backlink.
It doesn’t have to be a huge or famous website like the New York Times or Wikipedia, just a site that Google is aware of and frequently scanning. For example, a local online magazine.
Just like a word-of-mouth referral, a backlink is the simplest way for Google to know you exist to begin with. From there, it can crawl your entire site through internal links.
Internal Links
Internal links are the links in one of your webpages linking to another web page within your own site. For example, if your about page connects to your refund policy page, that is an internal link.
Internal links are vital because they are the main way Googlebot and other crawlers can navigate your site. If you have orphan pages (aka, pages that link to nothing and nothing links to them), chances are search engines can’t see them!
Performance Optimization
There are billions of web pages out there to crawl and search engines do not have all the time in the world to crawl them all. Especially of these sites are too difficult to scan, a crawler might decide it’s too much effort and move on to the next website.
Googlebot for example, will skip crawling pages that are too slow to load, or if the mobile version doesn’t render all of the links properly. For these seasons, optimizing for mobile devices and increasing page speed are key SEO priorities.
Will Googlebot Crawl you Website?
Now you know the basics of search engines finding new websites. To help it really stick, I built The Googlebot Game. It simulates a crawling algorithm and you get to optimize the site by allocating backlinks, internal links, and speed to the different pages.
Can you beat it? Click the button bellow to play.
And if you don’t have time to apply what you learned today I can personally check why Google is ignoring your site for free