In an increasingly competitive digital world, staying ahead of the curve means you need to have a webmaster who has more than a few tricks up their sleeve. The Digital WOW, powered by Consult PR, provides outsourced webmaster services that support ongoing SEO activities for our clients. This provides our clients with the tools needed to beat their competition and bring in more quality traffic to their website via increased rankings.

Google has the lion's share of the web search market (about 90%), after all, it is the dominant and most popular search engine on the planet. It’s used to look for anything and everything under the sun. That said, Yahoo and Bing still need to be considered as competition to Google, even though they only account for 10% of the search traffic. 

In order to deliver relevant and accurate search results as fast as possible, search engines use a technique known as search indexation. Search indexation is in many ways similar to old school “indexes” found at the end of a book, with keywords that lead to relevant information related to that keyword. This helps the search engine to arrange and index information related to a particular website so that if a user searches for something, the results are easier to locate and can be presented more efficiently to the searcher. The three phases of how search indexation works are:

Discovery: Google discovers the new pages in this particular phase through the information provided by sitemaps and updates made on existing pages. 

Crawling: Google starts to crawl the newly discovered pages and once it has collected the information and details about the new pages it makes a decision on how to index.

Indexing: Google saves and organizes the new pages within a database after having fully understood what they are about.         

So how do you make your website search result worthy? Well simply put….make it easy to index! Do a good job with your ON-SITE SEO (SEO activities conducted on your website itself). The latest in search indexation technology that can be implemented for your website is Google Indexing API (Application Programming Interface) and IndexNow.

Google Indexing API is an indexing system for any kind of website that allows its owner to directly notify Google when pages are added or removed. Google has billions of pages that are submitted to it each day, and it's a huge library from which you want your pages to be read, scanned out and acknowledged. The process of how Google and other platforms perform their respective indexing has been stated above, however what you really need them to do is give you a higher ranking (on the first page of Google if possible). 

Serving relevant results to search audiences is the very purpose of Indexation. A user inquiry is made and Google provides the most relevant answer from its database. Once the ON SITE SEO on your website is armed with this tool, it will lead to higher quality user traffic via higher search rankings.

NOTE: For websites with many short-lived pages like job postings or livestream videos, the Indexing API keeps content fresh in search results because it allows updates to be pushed individually.

IndexNow works in much the same way as Google Indexing API, however it serves Bing, Yahoo and Yandex thereby proving that about 10% of the internet traffic still goes through these search engines, and it helps to have your website calibrated to cater to this market. With the digital landscape changing by the day it's wise to have your webmaster use these tools to get you ahead of your competition and increase the number of visits that your website gets leading to better ROI.

In January 2022, the company Cloudflare published a report on the API traffic it has experienced on its global network and found that from “the first week of February 2021 to the first week of December 2021,” API “was by far the fastest growing data type (+21%).” Forbes Article, Sep 2022.

The Digital WOW, powered by Consult PR, offers an array of À la carte digital marketing services, some simulating an outsourced webmaster. When you hear about SEO/outsourced webmaster services, what usually comes to mind is an expenditure of thousands of dollars/ month. But with us, implementing Google Indexing API and IndexNow costs a mere few hundred dollars (one-time). Get your website more visibility, higher ranking in google searches and have your business achieve the desired results/scale new heights with this small but meaningful investment. Although there are many other steps that need to be taken to achieve first page rankings, this is a vital yet inexpensive way to start getting there.

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