Providing information to the major search engines regarding the existence of a site is a very important part of SEO. For that, you need to carry out some specific tasks, lets have a look at them.
Sitemap contains links for all the pages and posts of a website that is required to be indexed by desired search engines. Yoast SEO Wordpress Plugin makes the job easier with its interface if you are working on a wordpress site. For a custom site, you need to create your own sitemap.xml or sitemap.php. XML-Sitemaps might come handy in this case as it'll create a sitemap for you. The only thing you need to do is enter your URL in the field and it'll scan through your site and create sitemap. Here's an example of a sitemap.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"> <url> <loc>you-root-doamain-url</loc> <lastmod>2016-06-16T02:15:17+00:00</lastmod> <priority>1.00</priority> </url> <url> <loc>you-page-full-url</loc> <lastmod>2016-06-16T02:15:17+00:00</lastmod> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>
Since google is one of the major search engines that contributes to almost 80% of the internet searches everyday, we'll focus on this search engine at first. Once the sitemap for a website is created, you can go to the Google Webmaster Home Page signing in with your google account. CLick on Add a Property button and type in your website's URL and verify your ownership of the page. You can find multiple alternatives to verify your site. The easiest method of them is to add a <meta> tag in your HTML file. Once done, go back to the search console and click on Verify. The verification success message will appear from where you can go to the search console dashboard.
Copy the URL of your sitemap which you want to submit to google. Click on the website for which you want to submit the sitemap from search console home page. Go to Crawl » Sitemaps and click on Add/Test Sitemap. Add your sitemap's partial URL there and click on Test. Check for errors. Resolve the errors if any and then submit it. Your website will be indexed by google generally within a week. You can go to Google Index » Index Status to track the progress.
Google recognizes the www version and non www version of a website as separate property and expects you to submit that too in your property list. Since you have already added the meta tag for google verification in your website, you can directly click on Verify to get the www version too verified. Make sure that you have redirected both of those urls into one using your .htaccess file else the content duplication error will occur for all pages. Go to Settings » Site Settings and select the preferred version of your website.
Add these lines in your .htaccess file to redirect non www version of your website urls to www versions.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
If you want to redirect a www version url to non www version then paste these in your .htaccess file instead.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Sign in to Bing Webmaster and add your site and sitemap in the form fields. Verify the ownership of the site by adding a <meta> tag in your website. You can see the statistics from Bing regarding search result appearances from My Sites option.
Go to Yandex Webmaster and log in with your google account. Add your site and add the verification <meta> tag in your website pages. Go to Indexing » Sitemap Files and submit your sitemap. Go through the sidemenus to track progress.
Go to Google Analytics and sign in with your google account. Provide an account name along with the website name, url, industry category and reporting timezone. You can add upto 50 different properties i.e. websites or applications in a google analytics account. Leave all the recommended data sharing setting checked and click on Get Tracking ID. Choose your country and check on to agree the terms and conditions from google analytics. You'll get a unique tracking ID and a piece of code snippet from google analytics. Copy it and paste it in your webpages. If you are working on a wordpress site, you can use the plugin named Google Analytics Dashboard for WP that'll take you through the process. Here onwards, you can track the pageviews, demographics, time spent on site, bounce rate and much more all in one place.
So, your website's sitemap has been submitted to all major search engines that'll do their work, you can focus on other aspects.
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