How do I get my website on Google?
The short answer
Usually you do not have to do anything — Google finds sites by following links, and most new sites appear within days to weeks. If yours has not, the cause is almost always one of four things: it is blocked by a setting, it has no links pointing to it, the content needs JavaScript to appear, or it is simply too new. Check with a site search before assuming anything.
On this page
First, check whether you already are
Before doing anything, find out whether Google has your site at all. Two checks:
Search site:yourdomain.com — this asks Google to list only pages from your site. If pages come back, you are indexed and your problem is ranking, not indexing. Those are very different problems with different solutions.
Search a distinctive phrase from one of your pages, in quotes. If that page comes back, it is indexed.
This distinction matters because most people asking "how do I get on Google" are already on Google. They are on page four, which feels the same as being absent but is a completely different fix.
If you are not indexed at all
Four causes account for nearly all of it.
1. Something is blocking it
The most common, and the most silent.
A noindex tag left over from when the site was being built. A robots.txt file blocking crawlers. A staging site that was never switched to live. Password protection.
These are catastrophic and invisible — the site looks perfect to you, and Google has been politely instructed to ignore it. Check this first, because everything else is wasted effort while it is true.
2. Nothing links to you
Google finds pages by following links. A brand new site with no links from anywhere is genuinely hard to discover.
The fix is not link buying. It is being listed where a business like yours would naturally be listed: your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, any trade association or local directory, suppliers who list their stockists.
3. The content needs JavaScript
If your page is empty until scripts run, some crawlers will see an empty page. Google can render JavaScript, but it is slower and less reliable than reading HTML directly.
Check by viewing your page's source. If your actual text is not in there, that is a real risk.
4. It is simply new
New sites take days to weeks. There is no way to make this instant, and anyone offering to is selling something else.
What actually helps
Submit a sitemap in Google Search Console. Free, takes ten minutes, and it tells Google exactly what pages exist rather than making it discover them. Search Console is also where you will see whether indexing is working.
Request indexing for important pages. Also in Search Console, for the handful of pages that matter most.
Set up your Google Business Profile. For a local business this gets you into local results independently of your website, and it usually works faster.
Link your own pages to each other. A page that nothing links to, including from your own navigation, is harder to find and reads as less important.
What does not help
Paying for submission to hundreds of search engines. These services are decades out of date. There are effectively two search engines that matter, and both find sites by crawling.
Meta keyword tags. Ignored for many years.
Submitting repeatedly. Requesting indexing five times does not work five times as well.
Once you are indexed
Being present is the start, not the finish. Ranking is a separate question, and the honest answer is that it takes three to six months of the site being useful, consistent and linked to.
The good news is that indexing is usually not your problem — and the checks above will tell you that in about two minutes.
The thing that decides this before any of it
Everything above assumes a search engine can read your pages at all. That is usually true — and when it is not, none of the rest matters.
The failure mode is a site whose content only appears after JavaScript has run. Google copes with that most of the time, at the cost of a delay in indexing. The AI assistants increasingly answering these questions mostly do not, so a site built that way can be invisible to them however good it is.
Helm sites ship their content as real HTML — the text is in the page before anything runs — with the sitemap generated and kept current, structured data in place, and Search Console connected from the SEO module. None of that is exotic. It is the difference between "usually indexed, eventually" and "readable by anything that looks".