Salam Alikum,
Most of us have a personal website — and that’s great!
But unfortunately, 90% of us forget one crucial step after publishing it:
How to make it appear in Google search results?
Why should you care?
- Because you control the first impression when someone searches your name.
- It also increases your chances of landing jobs and makes your work easier to discover.
📌 In this post, we’ll cover:
How to optimize your website to show up in search engines and improve its SEO.
The explanation uses Next.js, but these steps are general and can be applied to any site.
✅ Step 1: Connect Your Site to Google Search Console
This is the first and most important step.
You can verify your site in different ways:
- Meta Tag
- Or via DNS record
In Next.js, you can add the code inside the root layout metadata:
export const metadata = {
verification: {
google: "YOUR_KEY_HERE",
},
};After build, it will automatically be rendered as:
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="YOUR_KEY_HERE" />✅ Step 2: Create a Sitemap File
What’s a Sitemap?
It’s an XML file that contains all your site's pages and data about them. It helps search engines index your content.
In Next.js:
You can create a file named sitemap.ts, here’s an example:
export default function sitemap(): MetadataRoute.Sitemap {
return [
{
url: "https://devmahmoud.me",
lastModified: new Date(),
changeFrequency: "weekly",
priority: 1,
},
];
}This will generate an XML file you can view here:
https://lnkd.in/dxszGSNN
✅ Step 3: Create a robots.txt File
What’s robots.txt?
It’s a simple file that tells search engines which pages to index and which to ignore.
Example robots.ts content:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin
Sitemap: https://lnkd.in/dxszGSNN
✅ Finally...
Your site is now ready to show up on Google!
But don’t forget to continue improving your on-page SEO:
- Add meta titles and descriptions for each page
- Improve performance at: pagespeed.web.dev