Is your baby searchable?

As a developer, one of the dreams after making our product live is to get it on the first page of Google search. Isn’t it?

While working on one of the products in my workplace, I had integrated it with Google Analytics. During the analysis, I got to know that it’s not generating traffic from Google Search and the graph of its presence in google search was something like this

I was curious to know why? Before I share that,

Let’s check your current rank

1. Verify your domain on Google Search Console.
2. Go to URL inspect from the sidebar.
3. Now, add your URL and inspect it.
4. Sit back and let it take it time to crawl your site.

What needs your attention

If you got something like this:

It’s a point of concern! You know why? Because if someone searches your product on Google, there is the least chance that your product will appear in the first page of the search result. This is called, what you may have heard of, Search Engine Optimization(SEO). In simple terms, the better is your product’s SEO score, higher is the chances for it to appear on first page in Google search.

Understanding some basic requirements

Google discovers new websites by crawling and then adds it to their index. This is done using a web spider called GoogleBot.

Too many technical terms?! Let me make it simple for you!

• Crawling: The process of following hyperlinks on the web to discover new content.
• Indexing: The process of storing every web page in a vast database.
• Web spider: A piece of software designed to carry out the crawling process at scale.
• Googlebot: Google’s web spider.

How does it work?

Dynamic websites take limelight in today’s world.Still uses static pages for their announcement page, maintenance page etc. Why?

The convenience and stability of static pages works for the pages that don’t require constant editing. This stability not only brings ease but helps to do SEO for your product too. On the other hand, dynamic websites brings space for more advanced features like server-side rendering, updated content that leaves you nowhere behind in SEO. Let me share some factors on which SEO depends.

• Faster loading: The faster the page loads, the better ranking it gets.
• Easy to crawl: Google sends the crawler when something is searched, it compiles what they found and indexes them.
• Keywords: If your website has the new/trending/unique keywords, your rank will start to rise.
• Mobile-friendly Website: Users are spread across various devices. So, making your product compatible with all those devices should be a non-miss factor.
• Regular Updates: Was your product last updated 6 months ago? That’s the possible reason it’s not there in Google Search results.
• Static URLs: If the URL of your product will keep changing, it will need reindexing again and again. Keeping the URL statistics help to target your product better.

Choosing whether to make a dynamic or static website requires proper analysis. It depends on the aim of your product. If you have a robot to hard code your website code, static website is the best go. Don’t burn yourself because both have their own pros and cons in terms of SEO

After we know why to do it, next always comes how to do it

A usual Google search result is like:

So, you need to prepare your product for this detail at least to help in indexing.

Ways to improve SEO ranking

1. Title : Make sure you have <title> specified for the pages in the product.
2. Description : The search needs a description to show off your product when appeared.Add a meta tag in your index page specifying the following detail
   <meta name=”description” content=”Place the meta description text here.”>
3. Viewport: Viewport is a way to rank for mobile friendly rank. This tells the page of the website visible to the user. Add a meta tag in your index page specifying the following detail <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
4. Charset:
   It provides the browser information related to the encoding used to author the page.Add a meta tag in your index page specifying the following detail <meta charset=UTF-8">
5. Sitemap:
   Sitemap helps google to crawl into your website. With this you can specify the URL in your product Google crawler should/can crawl.
6. Remove crawl block from robot.txt:
   Is Google not indexing your entire website? It could be due to a crawl block in something called a robots.txt file.

Look for

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

User-agent: GoogleBot

Disallow: /

This isn’t allowing your product to be crawled. Edit this and let crawler reach the pages you want.

Once made these changes, inspect the URL again.

Now, if this appears

Congrats! It’s now indexed. Now, Google crawler will start to rank your product and help you to bring it in search results.

After a few days, your search graph will start to show something like this

I hope this helps you out to start with your product’s SEO. Please do share if you have more tips to add on to make the product rock!