Google is the most popular search engine in the world, with over 90% of the market share. If your blog isn’t indexed, then it won’t show up on Google, which really sucks. This means that if you want to get organic traffic to your Ghost blog (as we all do), your first step after publishing your Ghost blog should be making sure it’s indexed on Google as soon as possible.
What is indexing?
Indexing is the process through which search engines crawl, analyse, and store information about your blog. A well-indexed blog is more likely to appear in relevant search results, increasing its visibility to potential visitors and thus your organic traffic. Sorry for the repetition, I just wanted to make sure you understand how important getting your blog indexed is.
How do I get my Ghost blog indexed on Google?
Now that you have a basic understanding of indexing and why you should care, let’s take a look at how you can get your Ghost blog indexed as soon as possible, so you can grow your blog organically (aka for free).
1. Create an XML sitemap
The first step is to create an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages on your blog in a specific format that search engines understand. It’s used by search engines to find and index your pages automatically. Thankfully, Ghost already handles this for you and automatically generates a sitemap at https://yourghostblog.com/sitemap.xml.
2. Submit your sitemap
Once you’ve created your XML sitemap, you need to submit it to Google Search Console. Luckily for you, we’ve written a guide on how to set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. You can find it here.
3. Submit your pages
Once you’ve submitted your sitemap, you can either wait for Google to crawl your pages automatically (this can take weeks or not happen at all) or manually submit them. This is done by going your Google Search Console and going through the process of submitting them one by one. As you can imagine, this is a very time-consuming process, especially if you have a large number of pages. And it doesn’t always guarantee that your pages will actually get indexed. If this doesn’t put you off, we’ve also written guides on how to manually submit your pages for indexing on Google.
Automatically index your pages
Most of us have better things to do than sitting around all day and going through the tedious process of manually submitting pages for indexing, or waiting ages for Google to index them. This is one of the reasons why we built IndexPlease, which will help you do this automatically. It will only cost you 9$/month and we will automatically submit up to 400 pages per day (yes, really), for not just 1, but up to 5 of your Ghost sites, so they get indexed on not only Google, but also Google, Yandex, Seznam.cz and Naver within 48 hours.
Getting your pages automatically indexed is only one of the many things you can do with IndexPlease, so if you’re interested in what else we have to offer, check out our features page.