There are any number of amazing tools available on the web to help improve your website, and make it as efficient and profitable as you can. One of my favorite tools is the Google Search Console. Originally built as Google Webmaster Tools, the Google Search Console is a one-stop place to make a wide variety of key updates for your website and Google ranking.
One of my favorite tools available in Google Search Console, is the ability to submit a sitemap for your website. A sitemap is a list of a website’s pages, or most important pages, that will help Google crawl and index those pages. In WordPress, you can quickly and easily make this XML sitemap by using the Yoast plugin. Yoast will create the XML sitemap and provide a link that you can easily copy and paste into the sitemap settings on Google Search Console. It may take a little time for Google to first crawl based on the newly submitted sitemap, but once it’s submitted you’ll be able to verify if Google was able to successfully crawl the sitemap, as well as the date it was added and the last date they crawled the site.
Another very handy tool available in Google Search Console is the ability to remove a page from the Google listings. There are times that a page might not be important or desired to have indexed any longer. While there are options to do this through either the sites .htaccess file or Yoast, it may be advantageous to remove it from Google directly. Whether it was an old sales page, old marketing, outdated verbiage, you can remove those from showing up in Google with the Removals page. Simply add in the link and allow Google to do the heavy lifting.
Google Search Console is an amazing tool that any site owner should be using to help get the most out of their site. Afterall, over 90% of all searches are done on Google. Even though Google is an incredibly advanced algorithm, providing the search giant with as much input as we can will only help our results.