BigCommerce offers ecommerce stores which are nothing else than websites which let you sell online. That being said Google sees them as regular websites and showing up on search engines and ranking must follow the well known rules.
There is still some confusion among BigCommerce store owners regarding the sitemap, indexing, PageRank, robots.txt and several other SEO "how to" questions. Although it may seem easy to understand, the question "How to show up on Google?" is a riddle for many.
Many readers of our BigCommerce SEO series already know a lot of these things, but I felt the need to answer this basic question too since it pops up frequently.
How does Google Search work?
Before we show up our website on Google we need to know how search works. One of the things to remember is that we do not directly search the web using Google. Instead we enter our query in the search field and then Google's servers search through their entire database (index) for pages that might be related to our query and then ranks those pages based on 200 factors, PageRank being way to small nowadays to be considered important in ranking.
See below the easiest and simplest explanation from Matt Cutts about how a Google search works:
Many more details about how search works can be read here.
How your website shows up on Google: via indexing
Now that you got the basics of search you may want to understand the process a search engine undergoes: crawling, indexing and then ranking.
As you see in the video above after crawling Google indexes documents (pages) based on the words they contain and then matches those documents with the search query. Basically they create a library of webpages from which they analyze the most relevant ones and then show them in the search results.
You would think that Google might remain stale if some sites are updated very often, but PageRank and the frequency at which you publish pages comes into play.
At this point I want us all to remember that higher PageRank helps with faster crawling, NOT better ranking. So, if a SEO guy tells you that a bigger PR ranks better send him home. Checking PageRank is only one of the elements (along with page/domain authority, ranking, a good site, good backlinks and other metrics) that will help you see if a site is reputable or not, but not the main one.
Below you will see a very good explanation of PageRank done by Rand Fishkin. PageRank does not take into account a lot of things and it just calculates roughly the quantity of links to a page. It also helps checking the history of a website.
And, of course, PageRank is for PAGES only.
Best SEO practices to show up on Google
This part won't offer details on how to rank better. Showing up on Google or being indexed is only a part in the whole process of getting visitors from this search giant.
If you want to read about ranking factors see Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors or SEO Moz's survey.
Before I write about these small things I need to speak about time. The time from which a website is created to the time the pages show up in Google. One word is absolute in this endeavor: relativity.
Yes, when we first open up a new site we cannot decide when its pages will be indexed in Google. The first pages will show up only after a week or even more. So, publishing your first page and then asking in two hours why your page is not in Google is not a reasonable thing to ask.
If you publish regularly, let's say once a day, after about a month (personal estimate) you will see your pages indexed in less than 24 hours. On one of my blogs I get my pages indexed sometimes after only 10 minutes, but that is because I blog daily for almost two years now, I share my posts on social media and have received a couple of quality backlinks along the way.
Here are some facts about indexing:
- don't block crawlers with robots.txt - if you have line "Disallow: /" in robots.txt file then you block Google from crawling your site and thus from indexing it
- submitting a sitemap won't make indexing faster - submitting a sitemap will make easier for Google to discover your site's pages and then crawl them. This won't help directly with indexing. Usually after a while you will see that Google has indexed a big chunk of the pages submitted
- publishing regularly pages helps with indexing - if you publish often then Google will crawl your site more often and will show those pages in the index.
- create Google+, Facebook pages, setup different profiles in your industry and insert your website in there
- share, repin and tweet your links - helps also with branding
- get links from review sites or bloggers - backlinks are always (still) a good thing
- use press releases - these won't harm at all
- submit to social bookmarking sites - but only where you see that it fits right
Remember that the things above help with indexing, not ranking. For bloggers like me it is important to have my pages indexed faster because there are scrappers that, sometimes, rank better than me for the same search term having content from my blog and nothing else. Oh, yeah, and the scraper has lots of ads. Frustrating? Yes, but there are methods to fight back and even show Google that I am the original (delay RSS feed generation, simply blocking the IPs of the scraper and so on). But that is another talk.
So, now you know better how search works, how to show up on Google and, more important than that, how to show up faster. Now get some images indexed.