The primary goal for every creator is to be seen. Indexing, as mentioned in one of our previous articles, helps search engines and audiences find your content. Here are 6 free tools every creator should use to improve indexing and enhance visibility.
Google Search Console
This tool tops our list for the most reliable and effective indexing tool. It is a must-have tool for indexing and monitoring your website’s performance on Google. It allows you to:
Submit your sitemap for indexing, check for crawl errors, and monitor which pages are indexed.(Learn how to use Google Search Console here)
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools provides similar functionality for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. With this tool, you can submit URLs and sitemaps for indexing, get insights into how Bing views your site, and analyse backlinks and keyword performance.
Bing powers several search platforms, including Yahoo!, making it worthwhile for a broader reach.
Yandex Webmaster
Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia, offers a free Webmaster tool for creators targeting Russian-speaking audiences.
Some key features of Yandex include sitemap submissions, monitoring of crawling errors, and tools for analysing site visibility in Yandex searches.
Even if you don’t target Russia, indexing here can diversify your traffic sources.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Ahrefs is a popular SEO toolset, and their Webmaster Tools offers free access to key features, including site audit for SEO and indexing issues, backlink analysis.
Using ahrefs helps you get deeper insights into technical issues that may prevent your content from being indexed effectively. If you can, use the pid version, it has no limits to the kind of improvements you can make on your website.
Screaming Frog (Free Version)
Screaming Frog is a desktop application that crawls your website to identify indexing and SEO issues. The free version allows you to analyze up to 500 URLs, providing insights on broken links, missing metadata, page depth for indexing optimization.
This tool is suitable for small websites or creators just starting out. To reduce the number of urls analyzed, define what it to be excluded before performing the site analysis.
IndexNow
IndexNow is an open-source protocol supported by Bing, Yandex, and other search engines. It notifies search engines about content updates or new URLs for immediate indexing.
To use this tool, Install it on your website as an app or plugin depending on your chosen CMS(Content Managemnet System), submit URLs directly to participating search engines.
Since most of these tools perform nearly the same function, it is recommended that you pick one tool after you have done your research and feel satisfied. You can also run two different sites and compare results.
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