How you need to be in Googles Index before you can rank highly for SEO.
If you’re looking to list for a particular keyword you need to ensure that your webpage is added to Googles Index for that keyword. The Google Index is Googles stored collection of webpages for a particular term.
If you get into Googles index for a keyword it means being featured in their search results for that keyword. The index afterall is a list of webpages to visit for a particular keyword. If you’re not on the list, you won’t appear in the search results.
When you do a Google search say for ‘need new lightbulb’ — Google will reach into its index to find a list of websites that answer your query.
To get onto the list you need to be found by Google’s crawlers.
Web crawlers also known as Spiders crawl the web to find sites that provide relevant information on a particular search query. These crawlers will already have a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners.
If you’re not already in Googles index, you will have to get websites that are on the list to feature you.
What crawlers do is visit pages already on the list and use links they find on these pages to discover other sites, hopefully yours! Crawlers pay attention to new sites that are mentioned, changes to existing sites and dead links.
The crawler will visit web pages containing information about the search query — e.g. ‘need new lightbulb’, it will then follow the links on those pages to new pages, additional links found on the new pages will then also be added to Googles index and the crawlers will visit the new links and so on and so on until crawlers build a list of pages containing information about the suggested topic — in this case new lightbulbs.
The crawler now has an index of pages stored on the Google servers, waiting for a query linked to that information. Once you have made sure you are in Googles Index for your search query, the important step will be figuring out how to feature on the first page for those search results, but a key step is ensuring you show up in their results in the first place.
