Your site is built to be found. Every page has a title, a description, a canonical address and a link preview. There is a sitemap and a robots file, and both keep themselves. This page is about the few things you can do on top, and what each one is for.
All of it lives in Content → Settings → Search and analytics.
Prove the site is yours to Google
Google Search Console shows you how your site appears in Google: which searches bring people, which pages they land on, and anything Google could not read. It is free.
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and add your address as a URL prefix property.
- Choose the HTML tag method. Google shows a tag like
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="abc123...">. - Copy the part inside
content="..."and paste it into the Google Search Console box. Save. - Back in Search Console, press Verify.
The code goes on every page of your site. Google reads it, and that is all it does.
Submit the sitemap, once
A sitemap is a list of every page and post on your site, at
/sitemap.xml. Yours is written for you and changes the moment you add,
rename or delete something. There is nothing to refresh.
Google will find it on its own, because your robots file points at it. Submitting it once tells Google sooner:
- In Search Console, open Sitemaps.
- Paste the address from the Sitemap box in your settings. Submit.
After that, Google checks it on its own schedule. If you have just written something you want found today, open the page's address in Search Console's URL inspection and press Request indexing. That asks Google to come now rather than later.
The tree of links under a result
Sometimes Google shows a site with a few of its pages listed under it. Google calls these sitelinks. You cannot ask for them. Google adds them when it is sure what the pages are, usually once a site has had some visitors.
What helps:
- A menu, with each page named for what it is. Build it in Content → Navigation.
- Page titles that say what the page is. How I work, not More.
- A home page that names you and what you do.
The sitemap and the page descriptions do the rest.
Count your visitors with Google Analytics
Google Analytics counts who visits, from where, and what they read.
- At analytics.google.com, make a property for your site. Choose Web as the platform.
- Find the Measurement ID. It looks like
G-ABC1234567. - Paste it into the Google Analytics box. Save.
Your own visits are left out while you are signed in, so you do not count yourself. To check it is working, open your site in a private window and watch the real-time report.
Your icon
The small picture in the browser tab and beside your result in search is your initials, drawn from your site title. It exists the moment your site does. Change your title and it changes with it.
Record visits with Microsoft Clarity, on Pro
Clarity is free from Microsoft. It records how people move through your pages, so you can watch a visit back, and draws heatmaps of where they press. It tells you things a count cannot: where people stop reading, and what they tried to click.
- At clarity.microsoft.com, add a project for your site.
- In the project's settings, under Setup, find the project ID. It is about ten letters and digits.
- Paste it into the Microsoft Clarity box. Save.
Your own visits are left out here too, the same way as with Analytics.