How to get your website on Google

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "web crawlers" that explore the web on a regular basis to find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our bots crawl the web. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34397?hl=en&ref_topic=3309469

You can check to see if your site is already included in Google's index, by doing do a site search for your site's URL.

For Example:

site:sites.rootsweb.com/~gearyfamily/     and you will see a list of results for my site.

site:freepages.rootsweb.com/~pasherfp/computers/    and you will see the results for Pat Asher's site

If Google cannot find your site, it could be for a number of reasons:

  1. The site isn't well connected from other sites on the web. In other words, there are very few links TO your site from other sites.
  2. You've just launched a new site and Google hasn't had time to crawl it yet. Or, as in the case of Rootsweb, the sites have been down for some time.
  3. The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively.
  4. Google received an error when trying to crawl your site.

Submit URLs to Google

Google provides guidelines for building a crawler-friendly website. While there's no guarantee that the Google site crawler will find a particular site, following these guidelines should make your site appear in Google's search results. Google's Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you're doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Console can even send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site.

SIGN UP FOR SEARCH CONSOLE

BEFORE you start the process of submitting your site URL's to Google, please read Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide and Preferred URL for YOUR Rootsweb Sites

Google even offers a printable checklist for you to use here

Register and Submit Your Site

Step One: Register your site with Search Console to help optimize your site's performance in Search, and gain a better understanding of how Google's systems crawl, index, and serve your content. In addition, you’ll get access to enhanced reporting tools to make sure your content meets Google's guidelines and your markup is error free.

Screenshot: Google Verification.

Use the exact address of your property - For example: htt​p:// and htt​ps:// are counted as different properties.

Data collection for a property starts as soon as the property is added in any Search Console account, even before it is verified. Data collection continues as long as any user has that property in their account, whether or not it has a verified owner. Data is only retained for a certain period of time, however, before it is deleted.

Step Two: Verification is the process of proving that you own the site that you claim to own. Google needs to confirm ownership because once you are verified for a site you have access to its private Google Search data, and can affect how Google Search crawls it. In the verification popup, select a verification method to prove that you own the site and follow the verification instructions on the page.  Learn more about verification.

Screenshot: Google verification.

Screenshot: Google verification.

By providing Google with a direct list of URLs to your content, known as a sitemap, you are making it easier (and quicker) for Google to find your pages. You are not relying  solely on your page’s relationship to other referring pages on the wider web. This speeds up the process of Google's systems discovering your content. Typically, you host the sitemap on your domain in a place accessible by Googlebot.

Build and submit a sitemap:

  1. Decide which pages on your site should be crawled by Google, and determine the canonical version of each page.
  2. Decide which sitemap format you want to use. You can create your sitemap manually or choose from a number of third-party tools to generate your sitemap for you.
  3. Test your sitemap using the Search Console Sitemaps testing tool.
  4. Make your sitemap available to Google by adding it to your robots.txt file or directly submitting it to Search Console.

More about sitemaps

A sitemap is a XML file that holds complete list of page URLs for a site along with other additional details (metadata of each URLs, when it was last updated etc.).

It ‘s primary purpose is to inform search engines about pages on your sites that are available for crawling.

A HTML sitemap is intended for folks viewing your website. It is a general overview of the website pages. It allow users to easily navigate a website.