SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines?
If search engines don’t know your website or webpage exists, your chance of ranking isn’t just an improbability, it’s an impossibility.
But here’s the thing: it takes time for search engines to discover (and index) new websites.
That means if you search for your two-day-old website in Google, chances are you’ll be disappointed. In fact, 9 times out of 10, you’ll find nothing.
However, even a few weeks after going live, you may still not see your website in Google, Bing and Yahoo, which have a combined market share of ~96%.
If this applies to you, and you now want to know the fastest way to submit your website to the search engines, then you’re in the right place.
Here’s what we’ll be discussing in this article:
* How to submit your website to Google, Bing, and Yahoo
* How to check your website is indexed (and what to do if it isn’t)
* What to do if your website (or web page) isn’t indexed
* Why submitting your website to Google ≠ rankings (and how to fix this)
But first, you might be wondering…
Do you really need to submit your website to search engines?
Google and other search engines weren’t built to rely on manual submissions. That’s why they crawl the web.
Not familiar with crawling? It’s when search engines look for new links on websites and subsequently “follow” them. If a newly-discovered link leads to something useful, that page is then added to the index.
Matt Cutts explains more about crawling and how it works in this video.
It’s also theorized that Google looks to many other data sources, such as Chrome browser usage statistics and domain registration data to aid in their never-ending pursuit of new websites and webpages.
To summarize, this means that search engines are pretty good at discovering new websites and webpages on their own, providing that they’re linked to from somewhere on the web.
Why you should still submit your website to search engines
Here are just a few reasons why manual submissions are still a “thing”:
1) It’s better to be safe than sorry) Let’s face it, search engines will probably be able to find your website regardless of whether or not you choose to manually submit it) But is “probably” good enough? I mean, submitting your website only takes a minute-or-two) So why risk it?
2) Search engines can’t figure out everything via crawling) If you submit your website via the methods discussed below, you’ll have the opportunity to supply Google and Bing with some useful information about your website) For example, you can tell them how important you deem each of your pages to be) They couldn’t obtain this information from crawling alone)
3) It helps to improve your website) Google and Bing each offer some insights as to how they view your website in their respective “management dashboards” (more on this later!)) There are also various tools for testing your web pages, and they’ll even alert you if potential problems or errors occur on your site)
Having said that, be aware that submitting your website to, and getting indexed by Google is only part of the battle. The real difficulty often lies in ranking for your desired search terms.
Don’t worry though, we’ve included some advice on how to do that in this very article.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Read more here.