Connecting with Google

Mathias-Erik Tempel

Senior Support Specialist

I am Mathias-Erik, long-time support agent and current marketing manager at Voog. After spending three and half years helping out Voog users, I’ve learned a lot about creating websites and how to prepare them to follow various trends — whether they are from design standpoint, such as adapting to mobile, or how to keep up with necessities that have been cast by giants like Google or Facebook.

Voog hosting a Developers Day event in 2016

In my experience, one of the most popular questions that we’ve received over the years is, how can one get their website to show up on Google. As a matter of fact, our older blog article on this topic still gets thousands of visits daily and ironically enough, it’s showing up as one of the top results on THE search engine. Without getting too much ahead of ourselves, let's first ask the age-old question — what exactly is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in search engine's unpaid results.
Keep in mind, it’s not the platform you use but the means that you take as the site owner that supports your SEO success.

I've heard that I have to add keywords to my website

A common misconception is that you need to have specially placed keywords in your site design for Google to notice you. It’s actually the content on your website and the fact that you’ve prepared the small details, such as titles, page descriptions and OG-tags in your design. All of it is manual work and there’s really no magic ingredients that get you in front of the line.

And the content has to be from you to your site visitors, not to fit some odd Google rules to favor your SEO.

It used to be so that Google wanted specific keywords. Nowadays, the robots read your content and figure out the keywords on their own. And if you share your website with the world, make sure you add page descriptions and images to them (also known as Open Graph tags) — this is crucial because Facebook will read this info and then display it along with your link. The same description will also show up in the Google search results. Again, keep it human and write it for people to read, not for robots for Black Hat SEO which will most likely cause you trouble.

Voog getting connected on a warm summer day out of the office

I've done it all but still no results

After putting in the work and doing all of the previously mentioned, and a little extra, it still won’t be enough for Google to take notice. You need to plug in and here’s where Google Search Console comes in handy.

Basically, it’s the tool to connect you with Google — you can get your content out there, make sure they read your sitemap, detect broken links and even have them re-crawl (that means indexing) your site if needed. Neat, right?

Give it time

If you’re trying all this out, please remember that it’s truly not possible to rush the results. Google has their eyes on you and will index your website soon enough — sometimes it may take a few weeks or even months.

You can help the process by sharing your website on social media and the traffic itself will give input to Google. It’s the organic way!
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