Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website is essential if you wish to build your reputation, rank higher in search results, and get valuable – essentially free – organic traffic!
LearnWorlds can automatically create a sitemap for your school and pass it along to Google, Bing, and other search engines. This will increase the number of pages indexed and improve your overall ranking.
How does Google know which sites from around the web to crawl and how often to do it?
Google’s bots crawl and index everything they can however, not all sites get equal treatment. Big, well-known, and especially well-linked sites are indexed more frequently. More importantly, Google spends more bot bandwidth and processing time on those high-value sites in order to crawl even more pages and extract every last drop of keywords and links from them.
My school/website is new/small. How am I going to get up there with the big names?
If you have a new/small website then your Domain Rank is small, you don’t have enough backlinks from other sites and likely you get equally small scores in the hundreds of variables that the Google algorithm uses when deciding which pages to crawl and how to rank the various sites. In this case, if you are lucky, the Google crawler/bot will find your website but only spend a few milliseconds in there and will probably not bother with anything beyond your homepage or, worse, randomly select a few pages from your website. This means that all the great course and sales pages you spent so much time creating might probably go unnoticed.
How can I avoid this?
If your school/website doesn’t rank high then people will not find it. So, they will not link back to it and Google will keep ignoring it. As with all things, you need to start from somewhere and work your way to the top. One thing you can do is sit around and wait for Google to drop by your website and crawl it.
A Google bot will eventually oblige and visit your site however it will not know what to look for and which pages to crawl. What it will do is randomly choose a few pages, besides your homepage, and it’s likely that they will not be the most important pages.
Faster results for my school
Google, along with all the other less popular search engines, relies on an internet standard called sitemaps. These sitemaps are, well, “maps” of a website, complete inventories of all the webpages included in a website, along with highly useful metadata (for a search engine, that is), such as full URL, page titles, page hierarchy, when a page was last modified and how frequently it’s likely to be updated in the future. By giving the search engine bot a well-structured sitemap you really increase your chances of getting the proper webpages crawled and indexed, ultimately showing up higher in Google search results.
Where can I get one for my site?
In theory, you can manually compile such a sitemap and submit it to Google to help its crawler index the pages that really matter. Sitemaps are written in XML, a markup language – just shy of a programming language in complexity – and has its own protocol, grammar, and rules. There are all sorts of formats and guidelines to be followed and the slightest error in your sitemap can give Google a headache, earning perhaps an SEO penalty for your school. With every update you make, you would have to do this again. However, we offer a built-in dynamically generated, comprehensive sitemap for every LearnWorlds school.
It includes all the public pages you create in your school and all the proper metadata, like when they were last updated. And you don’t have to worry about maintaining the sitemap. With every page, you add, with every title you change, or with any page, you edit and save, a new version of the Sitemap gets created, always reflecting the latest structure of your site, always ready to help Google rank your most important pages.
In fact, LearnWorlds is the first and only e-learning platform that automatically creates sitemaps to help you with your SEO efforts!
Will I have to submit It to Google, Bing, and the rest?
Yes, you can do it and it will speed things up. However, we made sure that every time a bot from Google (or from any other search engine for that matter) lands on your website, it’s immediately presented with a helpful sitemap.
Each LearnWorlds school has now been equipped with its own Robots.txt file. That’s another internet Standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers. Υour school’s Robot.txt includes a pointer to your school’s Sitemap, so anytime a search engine bot lands on your site it is guaranteed to find your sitemap and index all those pages.
So you actually don’t have to submit to manually submit your sitemap. However, we do strongly advise that you sign up for a free Google Search Console account and verify your URL with Google. It’s a super valuable tool that gives you invaluable insights about how visitors end up on your site and you can even see which searches they used to get there. Through the search console you can manually submit your sitemap to Google and, after a few days, see the report of how your school was crawled and how this has affected your Google rankings.
You can follow this article in showing how to submit a sitemap to Google and other search engines. This way you can get your school listed in Google in under 24 hours!