How to Check Google Indexing of a WordPress Website

Making sure search engines can crawl your website and the information displays properly in its search results is an important part of search engine optimization.

Following are the steps to perform Google SEO of a WordPress website

1. Improve Google Indexing

Follow the previous post How to Improve Google Indexing of a WordPress Website.

2. Add image descriptions in WordPress

To help improve SEO for your WordPress site, follow these steps to add or edit image descriptions.

Visit your website, right-click on your home page, and click View Page Source.
Search for an image tag (<img>).
Within the <img> tag, look for the “alt” attribute and confirm that it describes the image. For example, an image tag for a picture of a sunset might be alt=”sunset”, and the tag would look like this: <img src=”sunset.jpg” alt=”sunset”>
If there are any images that do not have values in the alt attribute:
1. In your admin menu choose Media.
2. Click on the image that needs a description to edit it.
3. Add the description to the alt field.
4. Repeat steps for any additional images that need descriptions.

3. Allow search engine indexing in WordPress

To help improve SEO ranking, follow these steps to make sure your WordPress site allows search engine indexing.

Log into WordPress.
Click Settings > Reading.
Make sure Discourage search engines from indexing this site is not selected.

4. Allow indexing of all pages in WordPress

Canonicalization describes how your URL is being used. Your URL can be used inconsistently for the same page (e.g., https://example.com and https://www.example.com) these will show the same page but they may resolve to different URLs. This can cause search engines to index your site incorrectly.

You can use the following steps to make sure all of your WordPress site’s pages can be indexed properly to help improve SEO ranking. There are many third party tools available to perform this test. We will be providing steps to use the URL Canonicalization test provided by SeoSiteCheckup.com. If you select a different tool, be sure to review the documentation.

Navigate to the URL Canonicalization Test tool.
Enter your domain into the Website URL field.
Click Checkup!
Review the results.
- If your URLs resolve to the same URL, no further steps are required.
- If there is a conflict, you may need to perform a Find and Replace in your database to correct the problem.

5. Check the length of WordPress site title

To help improve SEO for your site, follow these steps to make sure the site title is an optimum length. Google searches typically show the first 50-60 characters in your title tag (about 600 pixels wide). Your title should also include keywords that people will search for.

Visit your website, right-click on your home page, and click View Page Source.
Copy the text between the Title tags (<title>).
Visit this page at Moz.com.
Paste the text you copied into the Title tag preview tool and click Check
Make sure text does not get cut off in the preview. If text is cut off in the preview, shorten the title as needed.

6. Create a Sitemap in WordPress

Follow the video article How to Create a Sitemap in WordPress.

7. Create page descriptions in WordPress

You can use the following steps to make sure your WordPress site has page descriptions to improve SEO ranking.

There are many plugins that can be used for this, we will cover installing the Yoast SEO plugin. If you decide to use a different plugin, be sure you choose one that is actively being maintained.

Log into WordPress.
Install & Activate a plugin in WordPress.
Edit each page you want to have a description and use the Yoast SEO panel on those pages to add a description.
It is advisable to at least complete this step for your home page.

8. Check if Google is blocking my website

You can use the following steps to make sure your website is not blacklisted by Google. Being blacklisted will affect your SEO ranking. For more information, see safebrowsing.google.com.