How do you get a website found in Google?

Publish a page that answers a specific query, give it a unique title and description, and tell Google the site exists in Search Console. That gets you considered. It does not put you first. Anyone who sells a guaranteed position is not describing how search works.

This note was first published on March 22, 2017. The mechanics below are the part that aged well. Counts of “how many websites exist” did not, so they are gone.

What actually has to be on the page

Search for the business name and you will often find the site once it has been crawled, if the name is not shared with a hundred other companies. The harder job is the phrase a customer types when they do not know you yet. Write that phrase the way a person would say it. A shop in Redmond, Oregon should say Redmond, Oregon, because Redmond, Washington will otherwise take the query.

Use one h1 that states the topic, then real h2 sections. Put the answer in the opening sentences. A title tag of about 60 characters and a meta description of about 150 characters is a useful budget, not a law. Keyword stuffing is how a page gets ignored.

For a local business, the name, the phone number, and the city belong where a person and a crawler can both see them. Add a street only when you want customers to visit that building. Steelbridge lists Sisters, OR 97759.

Internal links should use words that say where they go. A page buried six clicks from the home page is a page you did not mean to be found.

Tell the engines the site is there

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are the public way to submit a sitemap. Submission is a request, not a timer. New pages get found because something links to them and because the XML sitemap lists them. After that, the page has to deserve a second visit: useful updates, not a blog that stopped in 2018 and a homepage that never mentions the town.

What this note will not do

It will not make a thin page rank. If the site does not help the visitor, there is nothing for the engine to prefer. Interactive pages, meaning a person can tell what to do next, beat a wall of claims about how good the company is.

The done-for-you version of this, including the answer-engine side, is SEO and GEO. The Central Oregon pages are the local version: Sisters, Bend, and Redmond, Oregon.