There is a difference between indexing a blog and indexing a site, just as the concept of indexing is different from that of positioning: find out what are the best strategies in this area
Anyone who has a blog and wants to improve the positioning of the contents inside it must know that there are differences between indexing a blog and directing a website. Not only that: there is also a difference between indexing and positioning a blog.
Since consistently publishing quality content on your blog is not enough to have adequate visibility on search engines, it is important to know how to index a blog and use all the most useful tricks to be taken into consideration by search engines and ensure a privileged visibility with respect to the competition.
The difference between indexing and ranking
As we have already pointed out, there is a substantial difference between indexing and positioning a blog. The term ” indexing ” refers to a series of actions that allow the crawler of the search engine (ie the software that analyzes the contents on the Net) to detect the presence of the blog and insert it into its index.
By ” positioning ” on the search engine, on the other hand, we mean the set of techniques necessary to improve the position of the blog for certain search keywords within the SERP, ie the search engine results page.
The difference between these two terms may appear “subtle” but has a very important consequence: any effort made to ensure the best positioning within the SERP with Local SEO or other techniques is useless if your blog is not indexed by the search engine Research.
How to index a blog
Before understanding how to index a blog, you need to make sure that your blog is really absent from the search engine index.
To verify that your blog is indexed on Google or not, you can use a particular search operator , that is a specific command to type in the query: this is the “ site ” command . Writing in the query “site: https://webdigitalmediagroup.com/ ” asks Google to search within that domain. If the search engine returns all the pages of the blog, it means that it is indexed correctly. On the contrary, if the request does not give results, it means that the blog is not indexed and that it is therefore necessary to work in this sense with some specific precautions.
The first step is to make sure that you have allowed the blog to be indexed, that is to say that you have removed the check from the item ” Search Engine Visibility ” in the reading section of the contents in the general settings menu. This check is generally used when the blog is under maintenance and you want to signal to search engines that the crawler shouldn’t take it into account.
It is then necessary to check the settings of the robot.txt file , which serves to provide instructions to the search engine to read the blog. In order for the blog pages to be indexed, the “no index” meta tag must not be present in the HTML code . There is another possibility (which, however, does not apply if the blog is just born): the blog may have been penalized by the search engine.
Generally, by now, the indexing of sites on Google takes place automatically, but to facilitate this step it is possible to use the specific ” add url ” tool of the search engine. Bing also allows you to submit your blog through its webmaster tools.
Another useful trick for indexing your blog is the insertion of a sitemap in the search console, which provides valuable information to search engines.
Finally, a new blog can also be reported to Google by a link from an authoritative site .
These last two practices also help the positioning of the blog itself within the SERP. However, they are not the only two possible measures.
How to improve the ranking of a blog
Who has a blog can address specific topics based on the topics that interest readers the most and are most searched for in search engines. Google provides the free Google Trends tool to know the most up-to-date search statistics, in USA and beyond. Furthermore, on the web there are several tools that allow you to analyze the performance of your blog for certain keywords .
In addition to producing articles (quality, ie optimized at SEO level) on the hottest and most sought after topics on the engines, to improve the positioning of the blog it is also important to work on the categorization of the various contents present within it.
The categories of a blog are containers that host the contents and organize them on a thematic basis. In this regard, it is useful to identify a small number of categories, optimize them from an SEO point of view , avoid similar categories from a semantic point of view and make sure that they are populated with content and do not remain empty or semi-empty.
As for the individual pages of the blog, it is important to make sure that the HTML tags are inserted correctly , from the Title Tag to the URL, passing through the Meta Description, the Header, the Alt Title and the internal links.
Proper indexing and good positioning are the first steps to obtain satisfactory results with your blog. This is why it is very important to know how to index a blog and ensure the right visibility on search engines.
