Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Search-Friendly
Lesson 3 from: Elevate Your Website with Google Tools
Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Search-Friendly
Lesson 3 from: Elevate Your Website with Google ToolsLesson Info
3. Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Search-Friendly
Lessons
Class Introduction
03:11 2Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Goal-Oriented
08:03 3Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Search-Friendly
07:04 4Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Convenient
06:14 5Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Organized
05:12 6Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Trustworthy
05:34 7Q&A
09:07Lesson Info
Tools That Can Help Make Your Website Search-Friendly
now that you know how to set and measure website goals. Let's talk about making sure that people find you in google search results before we dive in. Let's go over some basic terms First, a site map, you might immediately think of a table of contents. That's not what we're talking about here though a site map is a file design for each search engine like google, not humans. The file includes information about the pages, videos and other files on your site and the relationships between them search engines use this file in order to crawl the site more efficiently, you can use a site map to tell google which pages and files you think are more important on your site and provide valuable information about these files. For example, your site map can tell google when a web page was last updated and if there are any alternate language versions of that page. Next, a web crawler, a web crawler is a computer program. Google's version is called google bot that moves through web pages. It's crawling...
, which means finding new and updated information. Once a page is crawled, the hope is that it will be added to what's called the index. You can compare google's index to an index in the library, but instead of books, this index lists all of the web pages and files that google knows about when google visits or crawls your site detects new and updated pages and updates them in the index. The content must be part of the index to be included in google's search results. So what tool can help you with that enter the google search console. Search console is a free tool designed to help you improve your site's performance in google search results it used to be called Web master tools. You may remember that if you've had a website for a long time important note, you don't have to sign up for search console to be included in google search results. But this tool helps you understand and improve how google sees your site as a small business owner. You may not deep dive into the technical details. Search console in search console reports, but it can help you to understand how and why to make improvements. Search console tools and reports can help you with the following. It confirms that google can find and crawl your site, it can fix indexing problems and allow you to request re indexing of new or updated content. It shows google search traffic data for your site, for example, how often your site appears in google search, which search queries show your site and how often searchers click through for the queries, it also allows you to sign up for alerts if google encounters issues on your site. It helps you troubleshoot issues for mobile usability. To sign up for a free search console account start by visiting g dot c o slash search console. You'll need to add a website property to your account and verify your ownership. You can create a property that includes an entire domain, for example example dot com or a property that's limited to a single branch. For example example dot com slash clothing. Once verification is complete, your account will be ready and it will start collecting data for the reports. Here's a look inside search console. This screenshot shows what's called the performance report. It shows metrics about how your site performs in google search like how often it comes up in the results, it's average position, it's click through rate and any special features such as rich results that might appear to incidentally rich results formerly known as a rich card or a rich snippet refers to any extra information about your website that appears on google beyond the standard text link to your site. Rich results can include visual and interactive features like parasols and images. This is just one example. Report. The left navigation shows links to other reports and features available in search console. For example, the U. R. L. Inspector tool allows you to check a specific U. R. L. On your site to learn how google sees it. The mobile usability report shows web pages um that may have usability problems when viewed on mobile devices. Sign up for the search console account by visiting g dot c o slash search console. Let's throw in one bonus tip. Having a mobile friendly website is clearly important and you can use search consoles. Mobile usability report to help your site get there. Did you know that there's a way to see how your website looks on different devices from your desktop computer? You'll need to open your site in a chrome browser then right click on the web page and select inspect this takes you to chrome developer tools. You'll see the visible web page on the left side of the screen and then the html code on the right side. This tool allows you to inspect elements on your web page including you guessed it, how it looks on different devices above the html code. There is a small icon that shows a screen overlay by a mobile screen. It allows you to toggle the devices and see the web page on different size screens. You can change the size of the visible screen by entering screen dimensions, smartphone type and more. Let's try it visit your website from a chrome browser window. Right click on the web page and select inspect, look for the toggle device toolbar at the top above the html code preview. Now you can see what your site looks like on different devices on the left. Take a minute to explore the different ways to see your site, don't worry, you won't break it. This exercise can give you some ideas about areas you want to improve depending on how your site appears in different browser sizes. Mhm mm hmm. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm mm hmm. Yeah