It’s been a little while since my last post. Initially when I launched this site I wanted to create a place where I could share information that I came across and found interesting. Over these last few months I have found myself particularly busy with work and so haven’t had as much time to share information as I would have liked.
One thing that I have had time to start on is learning more about search engine optimization. It really started out with my frustration about why my new website wasn’t showing up when I searched for it on Google. I started working this problem in the same way that many of us look into problems, I googled it! There are a lot of fantastic resources out there, but one that seemed to do a good job was on victor2code.github.io. With information from here I was able to get the gem installed that I needed in order to build a site map, and I was able to get to Google’s search console to setup my site’s search profile.
At that point I was sure that everything was perfect and I wouldn’t have any further problems. I was wrong. This morning I ended up spending a little bit of time looking around, trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work. I discovered that there were two things that I did wrong. First, I didn’t register my sitemap on search console. It is a simple step that requires you to put the URL of your sitemap into search console so Google had get each page registered. I fixed that issue only to find the second problem, I didn’t have my URL entered correctly. In my _config.yml file I had registered my URL without the leading “https://”. I had become so used to this being added for me in the browser that I didn’t even think about it.
I have now finished these fixes and I will be posting them at the same time as I post this message. I will have to give it some time for Google’s bots to finish updating my site info, but I’m confident that it will turn out just fine.