March 25, 2018

Search Engine Indexing your Sites & Google Analytics

Google needs to know your web pages to see your site. So when people type in a search your site and its pages need to be indexed so that they can be found.

Inside WordPress you need to add a plugin that maps your site pages and posts.

The plugin I use is Google XML sitemap. This shows a URL list of all of your web pages and posts.

After setting up your mapping , you then can use Google Analytics to see the performance of your sites as to the number of visitors to your site.

I had a blog site that I relocated to a new Web Host and I noticed a severe dropoff of visitors to the new site compared to the original site. I concluded that my new site was not well indexed for Google search engine. So I have revisited my setup for this and decided to write a post on it and wil be monitoring it to see if there is an improvement.

Google Search Console

You need to take this and put it in your Google Search Console and test it to see that it is valid

First though you need to add your website to the home page of the Search console that you need to login with your login that you also require for your for google Analytics account.

When you add a property:

When you hit ADD it takes you to a page:

Where you can download a file that you need to download and put in the root directory of your website.

You can then tick the “I’m not a robot” box and verify that the file is installed correctly.

Clicking the continue button takes you to this page:

Where you see thir is no information about the site as it takes a couple of days to register (I think).

But you can go to the Sitemaps tab (Bottom right gray tab) and set up your link to your website.

So you now you have told google where your pages are, we need to look at how we can see if the number of visitors to the site changes after this indexing exercise.

Google Analytics

You need to set up a Google Analytics account here.Its free, you can get 100 web site codes for free.

After logging in , and if you already have websites setup with analytics, then click on home on the specific website and it gives you abn overview of gathered analytics of the site.

If you are new, then go directly to the ADMIN tab to set up a new site.

Finally you get your Tracking ID.(see below).

You need to cut & paste the code snippet into the Header.pgp file (this is for WordPress Websites, as this file creates headers on all wordpress web pages- This file is in your CURRENT THEME directory) in the <HEAD> tag as described in the page.

If you have a non wordpress site then you may need to paste it into all web pages in the <HEAD> tag. Again, this may take a couple of days before it is activated (similar to Search Console setup).