Best SEO Tips for Google Sites Websites

Add a Site Title

The site title, located in the top left of the page, is integral to identifying your brand or primary service/product. A succinct title will help users and crawlers both quickly recognize the purpose of your Google Site.

If you opt not to have a site title, then use descriptive page titles instead. Page titles like "home", "about" and "services" are too generic and will therefore impact the probability of these pages being indexed for search.

See the video: "Why isn't my Google Site indexed?"

Write Unique and Compelling Content

Write helpful content for your audience. Google Search wants to provide the best results to users, so strive to write the best copy you can. Make sure you edit whatever you publish to the web and confirm it's relevant to real people. Google Sites has all the tools you need to produce good content that real people want to read.

Don't Forget to Structure Your Copy

No one wants to be confronted with a wall of text. Structuring your content will promote readability by website visitors. Try using these formatting options:

• Headings and subheadings

• Bulleted or numbered lists

• Short paragraphs

Connect Google's Search Tools

Google provides two of the most useful webmaster tools available: Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Both of these can be easily connected to your Google Site web property. Then you can track how your content is performing and make needed adjustments to improve.

• Instructions on verifying your domain in Google Search Console for Google Sites

• Instructions on adding Google Analytics to your Google Site

Optimize URL Slugs and Page Names

A clear sitemap is beneficial to all who visit your website, so spend time organizing your content directories. Use page properties to customize the URL slugs of your Google Sites pages. Page names will often appear in search results, so check that they accurately describe the main purposes of your web page.

• Good Example: /paintings or /oil-paintings

• Bad Example: /093892832301-page or /art-paint-oil-artist-france-landscape-people

Optimize Images

Slow page load speeds will impact user experience on your website and increase bounce rates. Images are typically the biggest burden on a webpage's load time. Here's a few tips to tackle that problem.

• Scale images down before you upload them to your site

• Compress images using services like Tinypng

• Consider using the .jpg format instead of .png or .gif

Accessibility

• Upload accurate file names for your images

• Assign all images alt text

General SEO FAQ

Can Google Sites be indexed by Google?

Google Sites can be indexed by Google. There are many examples you can find of Google Sites websites performing well on SERP (search engine results page). Both free sites.google.com domain and custom domain published sites are able to be indexed.

However, due to sites.google.com domains being viewed as subdirectories, the odds of being indexed are somewhat unfavorable. We highly recommend connecting a custom domain to your site for better results due to being identified as a unique web property.

Do Google Sites rank better?

Google Sites receive no preference for page position in the algorithms for Google Search. Google Sites also have no inherent domain or page authority gained at creation.