Being indexed by Google or Bing is the first step to ranking. A search engine needs to know that your pages exist before it can place you at the top. There’s a number of ways to check if your site is properly indexed. I’m going to share the easiest way with you.

Your actual website pages

First of all, check how many pages you have on your website. You either know it by now by heart or you can check all the major links on your site including links to articles. Please note that a page is anything with unique URL (address) and preferably unique content. If you have a WordPress-based site, then you can easily see the count on the dashboard…

Pages Google / Bing knows about

Second you check to see if the same number of pages (at least similar) is indexed by Google. Here’s how you do it: Open Google.com and in the search box type: site:YourDomainName.com (try both with and without the www.). Take a look right under the search navigation, that’s the number of pages on your site Google knows about.

By the way, same works for Bing search engine…

Compare the two

Finally, make sure that the two number 1) pages you know about and 2) pages Google shows are about the same. If the difference is within 10%, then you should be fine. If it’s more, put it on your SEO todo list.

Easy, isn’t it? Yet it’s a very important piece of info if you want to improve search engine visibility and traffic. Stay tuned for more simple and practical solutions for small businesses and make sure you submit your questions here. I’m looking forward to answering those in my small business SEO guide.

Another handy Google search function

Here’s another trick you can quickly do using Google Search Operator such as site:yourdomain.com. Let’s say you published a post but you’re not sure if google has indexed it. There’s a simple way to check it. Type in the following operator in Google search field:

site:www.zagoumenov.com does google know about my site

If the article is indexed, then you should see it in results (above). Please note, I’m writing this article section as an update so the article is already indexed by Google. What happens with this search operator is that Google is only looking for results inside your domain.

This is a handy tool if you’re evaluating your site and seeing that some articles / pages are not ranking the way they are supposed to. The reasons might be different, but using this search operator you can check if your page is even in the index and if the page responds to your chosen keywords.

Stay tuned for more examples of using Google search operators to improve your site’s relationship with search engines. Feel free to leave a comment or two with questions of just say hi. Cheers!

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